Minor Confrontation

TN SUMMER when the city begins to steam and the mind juggles thoughts of green and blue, museums and their breezeless corridors are forgotten. Looking at paintings might be allotted to a day of rain, or to a Sunday stroll if you can not find a ride to the sea. On a summer weekday, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is silent. Girls in white pinafores stare from the spacious brown canvas by John Singer Sargent across an empty room to the portraits on the opposite wall. A single spectator feels like an intruder, as he passes between a Renoir and a Manet, conversing peacefully in a cool windowless room.

But this month a show of contemporary art interrupts the rhythmic silence of art history. Like the curious summer visitor, a current exhibition of works by graduate students at the Boston Museum School appears out of place. Without the approval bestowed by time, they are foreigners. Boldly, they ask the viewer to look. They call for attention.

Anyone intimidated by the ominous mood of the museum will be greeted by these experiments in many styles and mediums with a louder-than-usual tone. A minimal sculpture sits contemplating its own existence, while a geometric plastic chess set looks ready to be used. All the works are executed with scholarly precision. They will not shock any eye fed with the black cubes of Tony Smith or color-swirled bus posters of Peter Max. The students seem to be working our moderate styles before they break into more radical imagery.

None held your eye for long, each offsets another. Different types of pieces push the spectator in many directors, questioning, threatening, challenging the eye to understand flashing pink strokes of light or a black and white kalidescopic pattern.

The students exhibited here make the most exciting images when they deal with the human figure, a disturbing subject that has never been completely eliminated by abstract art. Even fragmented, dissolved, the figure maintains its appeal. The most striking sculpture is composed of sixteen editions of the same white face, like a plaster death mask, wedged into square compartments of a metal grid, like eggs in a box. Gliding in a sequence like words in a paragraph, the heads are tilted at slightly different angles. shifting with every position, the shadows redefine the expression on each colorless face. The head, locked in but just able to move, looks as though it was unable to think something through.

Keeping an appropriate distance, the Boston Museum presents this show with a minimum of fanfare: no special installation, on wall labels. The viewer does not even have titles to distract him. The art speaks for itself; it is not staged to beat the Museum of Modern Art. But with this small, unpublicized show, the Boston museum subtly presents its permanent collection from a new angle, making the eye compare established art of the past with art today. The confrontation continues through Monday.