Indians and Others

IKE THE CURRENT siege of Wounded Knee, the Peabody Museum's exhibit of American Indian Art is full of sobering echoes. These paintings are caught between a culture which never separated the notion of art from life as a whole, and one which occasionally sends young Indian painters to commercial art schools and sometimes hangs their paintings in museums. Some of the painters even have two names: one for life among Indians and one for life among white men.

Still, a certain freshness and life manage to shine through more conventional mannerisms in these 53 works. The subjects include animals, native rituals, and portraits. Exhibited in the museum's North American Indian gallery, the styles echo the design of everyday artifacts displayed nearby. All the painting, I think, are of outdoor subjects, and in general they rely on clearly defined outlines and shapes of flat color.

The exhibit suggests what contemporary abstract painting has learned from the Indian: a series of high pitched colors and color oppositions, for instance, which are now considered "American" and found in color field painting. Other debts are not visible: Pollock's drip paintings are derived in part not only from the technique of Navaho sand paintings but also from their assigning a role of spiritual expression to the process of painting itself.

HE FOGG'S current show of drawings by the young Ingres is of interest chiefly to the expert, but juxtaposed with some of the excellent later paintings and sketches also on display, it also adds a new element to any general understanding of the French master. Discovered by Phyllis Hattis, a graduate student in Fine Arts, the drawings were apparently done when the artist was 12 and 13, and have never been displayed before. They are mostly studies of plaster casts of Greek statues and represent the beginning of Ingres's "sculptural" style.

Ingres's brand of neoclassicism also derived a great deal from Greek coins and painted vases like those contained in the Frederick Watkins Collection exhibited on the first floor. Of particular interest is the Kleophrates vase, a work considered by some experts to be even more significant than the Met's latest embarassment.

Another show opened at the Fogg Thursday: a collection of contemporary Chinese landscape paintings by C.C. Wang and a number of earlier works from Wang's own collection. Meanwhile, the Busch-Reisinger plans to inaugerate a show of drawings by the Danish artist Jan Groth today; the next major show there will be works of Ferdinand Hodler, a now "re-appreciated" German painter of the nineteenth century. That show moves here from New York at the beginning of May.