Art H-R Art Forum

An exhibition of undergraduate art organized by undergraduates. At the Fogg through April 30

THERE is no madness, nothing outrageous and little startling among the works in Art Forum. The sophomores concentrating in Fine Arts who organized it set out "to create an occasion when the interested public can be introduced to art at Harvard." I'm glad they went to the trouble, even if art at Harvard seems to fall well within conventional lines of late twentieth century art. For Art Forum testifies that there are artists-to-be around who are making the necessary investigations into material, form, and expression which are prerequisite to achievement. And they're turning out credible art at the same time.

As one would expect in a community as conscientiously intellectual as Cambridge, many objects in the exhibit show intimate knowledge and technical mastery of games notable artists play. Mercifully, student artists no longer feel obliged to concentrate on drawing from plaster casts and copying masters.

James Brown's "Red Zip," for example, uses Kenneth Noland's ruler-straight horizontal stripes. The painting concerns itself with color relativity-two burgundy stripes surround a red one, two reds an orange, and two oranges a yellow, reading down the canvas. Alex Packer's "Blues Progression" is a similar investigation of a hue family on a flat plane. His acrylics run from red-violet through aqua. But Packer's three-paneled work attributes more importance to form than does James Brown's-stripes end in curved edges, and three vertical stripes are halved in the last panel, leaving a blue one erect in solitary splendor. And Peter Sutton's "Homage a Picasso," one in oils, goes back to Cubistic formal analysis. The oil painting cleverly echoes Picasso's "Three Musicians," complete with guitar neck.

Other exhibitors experiment with media to develop personal styles. Nikki Schuman uses water colors on unsized muslin to get blurred edges and indefinite forms. In a painting called "Seagulls," blues and greens and brown run over one another to create watery planes around and through two graceful human figures. In "Gross and Untitled," the blobby quality of paint seeping into fiber is used to depict two horrendously obese females in green bikinis.

While Miss Schuman tries for an illusion of depth, Jamie Smith actually builds out the canvas with pounds of acrylic paint. Smith's "Orpheus" is a light-flooded canvas reminiscent of Impressionism. Roughly textured yellow-greens make up a landscape with field and trees. David Brown uses elaborate surface treatment to an entirely different end. His "Life: Elaine" is a mannered portrait of a lady with classically abstracted features and gilt collar and background. It could be a painting of the sixteenth century. But there is a stylistically twentieth century figure off to one side, and a plastic coating makes the lady gleam-perfected, distant, and ideal.

OTHER students concentrate on more traditional, though terribly exacting, struggles with draughtsmanship and realism. Sarah Holly Alderman's "Undergrowth" is an incredibly dense and detailed drawing full of grasses and ferns and wild plants. Her background tree stump floats a little in space, but the range of textures she gets out of her pencil is truly admirable. And Steve Selkowitz's "Mantis," my favorite sculpture in the show, is actually a three-dimensional kind of draughtsmanship. A yard-long praying mantis that waits high on a wall, the piece is built of soldered wires-lines in space-and is disconcertingly realistic, down to the last hair on its leg.

Art Forum hardly includes all the artists or kinds of art around Harvard. But at least it informs the community that there are artists at Harvard, and notes specifically who some are. Especially because the exhibit is housed under the ancient and honorable roof of the Fogg, it should improve the status of art here. And this is a pretty impressive accomplishment within the context of a University that considers art a frivolous pursuit, and only grudgingly recognizes design.