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Who are
the hundred leading artists in the world today? That is a good
journalistic question, and Canadian-born Lord Beaverbrook, 84,
Britain's most opinionated publisher, believes that a good journalistic
question deserves an answer. Last week the Beaver's answer went
on view at his modern little Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton,
N.B. To organize the show, Beaverbrook assigned John Richardson,
39, art critic of his London Evening Standard. Richardson drew
up a list of 200 artists, then whittled it down to 102 in consultations
with such authorities as Sir Kenneth Clark, former director
of London's National Gallery, and Alfred Barr of Manhattan's
Museum of Modern Art. The show is called the Dunn International
after the present Lady Beaverbrook's first husband, Canadian
Steelmaker Sir James Dunn.
Glass of Water.
Lord Beaverbrook, plagued with ailments, stayed home on the
Riviera, but chances are that as a man whose favorite painting
is a Gainsborough, he would have recoiled from most of the choices.
Although such top representational painters as Edward Hopper
and Andrew Wyeth sent comfortably realistic scenes to settle
the eye, there was plenty else to make it boggle, from Barnett
Newman's eccentric, hard-edge stripes in his Black Fire to Robert
Rauschenberg's Trophy II, a pop art combine in four pieces equipped
with a real glass of water on a shelf with a spoon kerplunk
in it. The only true portraits, surprisingly, are Abstract Expressionist
Willem de Kooning's Marilyn Monroe and Pop Artist James Rosenquist's
Portrait of the Scull Family. Little-known names among the 102
were Australia's Brett Whiteley and a young Indian named Mohan
Samant. .... After a month the exhibition will move to London's
Tate Gallery. Even in a big art center it should prove instructive.
Picasso's nude and a bleak industrial landscape by British Primitive
Laurence Stephen are separated not by a gulf, but by the vast
sea that present-day artists venture upon. Beaverbrook's hundred
provide a lively answer to an impossible question.
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