On Art

...Harloff managed to exhibit simultaneously in a Dutch gallery in Arnhem, in an Italian gallery in Milan and in the basement of the English bookstore in Paris on the Rue de Seine...

...But their prices are perhaps somewhat lower than those brought until recently by the works of abstract artists who were reaping the profits of an unprecedented wave of sheer speculation...

...Others, sensing a change in the taste of their potential customers, are painfully rediscovering the possibilities of figurative painting...

...His works can thus be interpreted as very complex emblems, like those of Tarot cards or those which once illustrated the works of the 17th-century Metaphysical poets...

...Edouard Roditi, an American poet and art historian now residing in Paris, is author of Dialogues on Art...

...But Surrealism is also booming, with Max Ernst, Victor Brauner, Mabille and Matta as its most famous living representatives...

...Cordier achieved record publicity with his exhibitions of the weird allegories of the scurrilous Berlin "naive" painter Friedrich Schroeder-Sonnenstern, and then with the more crudely realistic and garish allegories of Clovis Trouille, who achieves effects analogous to those of New York's Pop-art or of the sado-masochistic iconography that adorns many pinball machines...

...A life of legendary poverty, illness or misfortune seems to be almost a prerequisite for the posthumous glory of a Montparnasse artist...

...Certainly, the biographies of a good 50 painters and sculptors who haunted this Bohemia before 1940 still offer all the necessary characteristics for the pious legends of saints and martyrs of modern art...

...Another aspect of the shift in the Paris public's interests and tastes has been a boom in the kind of geometrical, or more formal, abstract art—as opposed to "formless" Tachisme or Abstract Expressionism—which belongs to the same general province of modern art as the works of Mondrian or Arp...

...Oddly enough, such works could also be faked without great difficulty...

...After the recent boom in the works of such also-ran Fauvists as Valtat, Manguin and Camoin, only Czobel, Leopold-Levy and Asselin might still be rediscovered...

...ON ART Letter from Paris By Edouard Roditi Paris In recent months, a mood reminiscent of the traditional Wall of Weeping has descended on most of those Parisian art galleries which had long been busy killing the goose that laid the golden egg of abstract art's phenomenal commercial success...

...He was also the subject of a whole new issue of the French periodical Bizarre, which is exclusively devoted to the more offbeat aspects of nearSurrealist art and letters...

...May we now expect similar revivals of interest in the painters Leon Weissberg and Adolf Feder, or in the sculptor Moyshe Kogan, or other such victims, during the occupation of Paris, of Nazi extermination policies...

...Some of the best-known abstract masters here, for whose new works waiting lists of American, European and Japanese collectors had been compiled since about 1955, now find no purchasers for the mass-produced imitations of their own earlier works, although they hopefully continue to churn them out...

...Gradually, many artists were forced to become specialists, each exploiting a tiny area of style or inspiration that was entirely his own...

...Moreover, Raymond Cordier's somewhat macabre gallery in the Left-Bank Rue Guénégaud has for the past two years been noisily marketing a whole group of post-Surrealists, or near-Surrealists, whose works are too obviously offbeat or frankly erotic for the near-by Galerie du Point Cardinal, where Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Brauner and Peverelli exhibit...

...Thoughtfully composed in terms of composition, of choice and arrangement of details and of colors, Harloff's art is also rich in "literary" intentions...

...Anyone still owning, for instance, a closet-full of works by some minor Fauvist, Cubist or School of Montparnasse masters of before 1930— all long considered a drug on the market—may now be sitting pretty...

...Successful recent exhibitions of earlier works of Ozenfant and Jean Hélion lead one to suspect the imminence of a revival of interest in the forgotten French Purists of the 1920s, including Serge Charchoune and Marcelle Cahn...

...And now that such Cubists as Herbin, Metzinger, Gleizes and Marcoussis are accepted as masters, Serge Férat, Leopold Survage, Henri Hayden and a few others are again arousing interest among dealers and collectors...

...This month...

...In the past, driven by a wildly competitive urge, many collectors insisted on purchasing almost exact replicas of works by the same artists they had already seen in other collections—as if works of art had to conform to the same esthetics as hard-boiled eggs...

...Even the illstarred French painter Emmanuel Gondouin has recently been rediscovered in a surprising one-man show of long-forgotten works that had somehow survived the disastrous dispersal of the contents of his studio, all of which were sold as junk after his untimely death...

...His paintings include words or slogans suggesting meanings that extend beyond the more strictly formal ones of any given painting...

...Of the many Montparnasse eclectics who had once been friends, neighbors or associates of Modigliani, Pascin and Soutine, such painters as Volovick, Krémègne and Kikoine are already represented, at long last, by major Right-Bank galleries...

...An artist's paintings or sculptures tended to become, even to a relative layman, immediately identifiable, like a signature on a check...

...One of the very few novel trends to have recently attracted attention in Paris is well illustrated in the work of Guy Harloff, a young "Beatnik" painter of Dutch origin...

...In what many dealers believe to be an unprecedented slump on the Paris art market, the few artists whose works reveal real qualities according to more traditional standards, or provoke some thought or discussion as novelties, still manage, it seems, to attract attention and to sell...

...Sonia Delaunay and Vasarély, among others, have now come very much to the fore...

...The decline of the sort of abstract art that can all too easily become repetitious or be forged now seems to be leading to a revival of interest in a number of styles or kinds of art which only two or three years ago had been despised as "old hat...