Painting in France 1900-1967

YOU CAN HARDLY wait. They are decked out in their best, a bit high, very nostalgic. You have the excited anticipatory feeling of meeting old close friends, and of finally talking to less known ones. You want to embrace each and itch to see which others are around the next corner which have not come.

This reunion is not Harvard's 25th but Painting in France 1900-1967, the current exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which brings together a terribly impressive roster of painters who have worked in France during this century. With the peculiar arrogance of the French, everyone who has painted within her borders is fair game for the show and just about every major European painter of the century is included. And with the peculiar canniness of the French, they are right. Somehow France is the place where people go to escape, to change, to be alone, or to find community.

The only common ground of the paintings on exhibit is that each was conceived on French soil during this century. Everything from Bonnard's impressionism to mirror-mobiles by Argentinian Julio le Parc can be found in it. Regrettably, in cutting back the show to fit limited gallery space here in Boston, the very most recent works--pop, op, neo-surrealist, have born the brunt of sacrifice. The point of the show, and the point of Paris, is its newness, excitement and freedom. No one has ever accused Boston of the same.

It is impossible to name all the artists or point out all of the outstanding works. Miro, Picasso, Chagall, Modigliani, de Stael, Matisse, Kandinsky, Vlamink--they are all there. Three very gentle and humourous Dubuffet's, a marvelous Miro bull, Max Ernst's flowers with sea-shell impressions for petals are examples of traditionally but well represented artists. Picasso steps out of the norm with a stage curtain painted for Diaghilev's Russian Ballet, recapturing Paris's sense of community, in contrast to the unique achievements of each artist separately.

Very well known artists are not the only ones on display. Two abstract works by the Russian Serge Poliakoff, big blocks of carefully modelled color, can be seen on entering the exhibit, near a very subtle work in cement--"In the Shadow of a Field"--by ex-conservationist Raoul Ubac, while the plastic, organic cubism of an early Picabia is across the hall.

THE HANGING of the show itself is backwards, and some visitors may prefer to start at the end and work toward the front, as the original creators of the collection had planned. Yet objects have been placed together with careful attention to similarities in the types of works, however discontinuous the pattern is chronologically or by school. For instance, all portraits are combined in one small galery and geometric and cubist styles of all kinds are grouped in another. Dissimilarities are exploited as well. For example in the juxtaposition of Nicholaes de Stael's violent, angular Reclining Blue Nude on a Red Background and Jean Fautrier's The Gentle Woman, which is cool, liquid, and soft as an oyster.

This is not a connoisseur's exhibit. It is a bit facile, picking out the best known artists, in their most recognizable attire. The hand of the French public relations man, embracing the creative world under the tricolor makes us wonder if he doesn't want us to like him a little better, or visit his country a little sooner. But bribe or no bribe, reunions are not known for soul-searing communications, but for fun.