Catching Up with the Trends

...This development is said to have been facilitated by the introduction of acrylic paints...

...He has the Anglo-Germanic potty-fixation as manifested in a photograph of a squatting fashion model, retouched to make her bare-assed, and again in a small wash drawing entitled Eine Kleine Scheisse...

...Furthermore, Russell maintains, they like winners "and they like them to win by a knockout...

...International hipster that he may be, Hamilton is irrevocably, cosily, and embarrassingly English...

...to experience the whole splendid camp thing at first hand...

...Nonetheless, Hamilton's intellectual credit cards are impeccable: some mannered pencil illustrations for James Joyce's Ulysses, and a little dalliance with Futurism, Cubism and the discoveries of Muybridge...

...In fact, their repulsiveness recalls a chilling remark by Kenworth Moffett in his introduction to the catalogue: "Picture viewing has become the sole touchstone for picture making...

...These elegant canvases, done in earth colors, have heavy, emotional accents of im-pastoed spackle...

...This marks a return to monochrome, but the results are very close to the more disagreeable substitutes for leather...

...when his satire can be understood, it is quite genial...

...Kelly gives the impression of being a gentle, tentative personality unwilling to range too far...

...Now at mid-career?they are all in their early 50s-each of them represents an important trend in late-20th-century art...

...For another, they have a homemade character, despite the precision of shape -both geometric and organic-and the primeness of color...

...Jules Olitski, an alumnus of the National Academy of Design, a school that has not nurtured many avant-gardists, originally started out as a figure painter...

...His current show at the Whitney, however, opens with his work from the late '50s when, after a period in Paris, he turned to abstraction...

...That it has said relatively little in art, Russell tells us, is due to the national "disposition to test for overtones and echoes and buried borrowings [in ceaseless probing of] ideas that purport to be new...

...The liveliness of Ellsworth Kelly's abstractions, now on display at the Museum of Modern Art, is not entirely due to the contrast with Olitski's work...

...In 1965, he began using a spray gun and thereafter became increasingly preoccupied with technique on a gigantic scale...

...another is the exposure of under-spraying masked from later layers by tape...

...Indeed, it would look as if he had cut himself off various lengths of haze were it not for the formal devices he uses to terminate them...

...Valentine's Day and a man is not a man until he has eaten six other men for breakfast...

...The more than 160 objects in the show include small oils, watercolors, drawings and creations in mixed media that emphasize photography...

...Americans, in contrast, "like to take their ideas one by one and hammer them home till the head of the hammer comes apart from the shaft...

...They are beautiful, friendly, and very efficient...

...It is a style of allover painting that must be as difficult to "end" as certain rock numbers...

...Kelly, too, began as a figurative artist and turned to abstraction in Paris, where he went in 1948 after serving two years in an Army camouflage unit...

...The harsh, symmetrical geometry of his new triangular and rhomboidal canvases makes him very much of the time...

...The use of the world "sole" seems an official acquiescence to the death sentence passed by the avant-garde on both art and humanity...

...A fussy painter of indecipherable private jokes, he is a verbose annotator of his impulses...

...All the same, his intermediary, John Russell, feels this primacy is hardly worth arguing, for he has much bigger claims to make...

...Similarly, Francis Bacon is acknowledged by way of a self-portrait painted over an out-of-focus photograph of Hamilton in the style of the master...

...Duchamp, above all others, has been his afflatus...

...Kent State, the astronauts, automobiles, JFK, Marilyn, Mick Jagger?they're all here, along with insights into plastic womanhood, though I missed the indictments of deodorants that are usually part of the package...

...Almost everything assembled here is pleasing, from the bright Parisian checkerboards-each square individually stretched and painted before being grouped together-to the larger, simpler designs of Isomorphic shapes and related sculpture in painted aluminum...

...Perhaps recognizing this, Olitski has begun painting directly in browns, with a squeegee...

...In representing two of Britain's bugbears, Americanism and the lower classes, which apparently are still synonymous, Hamilton may have produced the seminal Pop work years ahead of its time...

...Naturalist, connoisseur, technocrat and all-around cool cat, Hamilton is, above all, English and, as such, heir to a "civilization in which most things have been said before, and said very well...

...But he laid the foundations of his art sooner than his colleague: As the early paintings and constructions show, observed details of life have always been an important part of the creative process for Kelly, be they conjunctions of colors, shapes in nature, or architectural forms...

...His technique lets him down again when, in violation of the ancient law of painting, he mixes too many colors and produces a dead gray-brown effect...

...Thus, in the New York art scene, "Every day is St...

...Painting is now just a job, like being a bank president...

...There are moments in the show that lead one to suspect Hamilton is himself a composite of ready-mades, so predictable is his thinking...

...but only in this later work does he look like Olitski's contemporary...

...Yet he, as well, has moved toward a more mechanical perfectionism...

...Among the more striking pieces in the show is Gaza, a beautiful group of three horizontal panels-two of the same daffodil color sandwiching a third of more transparent yellow-Surmounted by a red panel, made slightly opaque by a dash of white...

...On the whole, though, Kelly's work is that of a man who has kept to his esthetic self, which could be the reason he has always seemed individual, especially in the hectic contexts of Abstract Expressionism and Pop...

...Maybe this explains why Olitski's magnificent but inert canvases have the quality of shrouds concealing something...

...He has also gained much prestige from a photographic montage done in 1956, featuring very jokily a non-U English home filled with furniture and modern accessories, and inhabited by a weight-lifter and a stripper...

...One is a contrasting brushstroke placed along the edges...

...It was in this period that Olitski caught the eye of the critic Clement Greenberg-a not disadvantageous thing to happen to an aspirant...

...The effects of Mon-drian and Arp are visible in the early pieces, and the influence of Pop appears later on, notably in a pale blue chevron on a close-toned green ground...

...Obviously the English class barriers haven't really crumbled, they have just been redeployed...

...At the beginning of the '60s, Olitski took up color field painting, a style that Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis derived from Jackson Pollock's all-over approach...

...Clearly, what he enjoys most U puttering around with his processes, being contemporary, and endlessly reworking tiny idees recus, largely taken from American magazines, even though he has visited the U.S...

...Strained through the English critic's astounding prose, the artist emerges a natural (if not born) gentleman...

...Designed and presented by the artist himself, whose plastic souvenirs (a portrait of the Guggenheim) are on sale at the museum store, the collection has little or no visual impact...

...Besides being the incarnation of Baudelaire's "painter of modern life," and a revealer "year by year, of new zones of unmastered meaning," he is also a "critic of language and . . . society...

...Olitski's contribution to the movement consists of large curtains of color, interrupted or balanced by small, contrasting blobs, and compositions of fat arcs and circular shapes...

...acrylic, on the other hand, was found to dilute perfectly into bright, pure stains...

...He has exactly the right blend of what he calls "reverence and cynicism" toward Pop culture, and he pays scrupulous tribute to its villains, heroes and milestones...

...In addition, Hamilton pays his respects to other artists, taking for example Jasper Johns' The Critic Smiles a step further in his own The Critic Laughs, by placing a set of false teeth on top of an electric toothbrush...

...That biings us to the English artist Richard Hamilton at the Guggenheim...

...In a way, Kelly's contribution has been shouted down by subsequent minimal developments...

...Hamilton has been showing regularly in England and abroad since 1950, but his grand old man status seems to be based chiefly on his contact in the mid-'50s with Duchamp, whose Large Glass he reconstructed...

...Conventional pigments, when made very liquid, tend to leave an oily resi-due on the surface or else the oil seeps into the unpainted parts of the canvas...

...A thickening of paint toward the center of the canvas also causes some tension, though it appears contrived and is not helped by a texture resembling cheap, peb-bled linoleum...

...Another very satisfactory composition is Brooklyn Bridge, consisting of two white, parenthesis-shaped bands entering back-to-back from the corners of a tall, dark-blue canvas...

...En masse, these mists of blended hues and tones are most impressive...

...For one thing, his pictures and sculptures, rarely more than 10 feet in their largest dimension and often smaller, are scaled to human measurements...