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As of Mattson, it might be said of Grosz that he gives a new aspect to familiar scenes, "so that a man may look into the life of things." The reality of Grosz, however, is of an earthier sort. "In former days, I thought a great deal to take part in political controversion, but now I am rather skeptical about the outcome," he says. "Today my conception seems to me somewhat dramatic. I want to express something I might term apocalyptic. For example I recently painted a little oil which I call Construction and Destruction. There are these two eternal forces which always possess the human mind. I can feel them at work sometimes in a simple stone, or in a landscape, in an effect that is dark, sinister, weird--yet inexplicable except as I take colors or lines to express it. "Satirical drawings, of which I did thousands in earlier days, become now not any more of so much importance to me. Flowers, weeds, birds, rocks, water and sun and the big moon, it seems to me, speak sometimes more to me than before and often are more familiar than the faces of human beings. But it is hard to speak of your own work when you feel that you have entered a new stage of development. "Generally speaking I have left the caricature. I think more of true, good painting, and at least I have not those convictions of frustration any more. I am much more interested in good rendering, in texture, quality, composition, and such, than in literary conception or the conveyed idea." The pragmatism, the hard and outlined reality, and the sense of dramatic report of the so-called American Scene painters, is very American, in the eyes of George Grosz, who looks, however, beyond the present confusions of trends and fashions to a possible change of epochal scale in the conception of the art of painting--one in which the omnipresent spectacle of the motion picture, so familiar to the American people, will be an important influence. The technical mastery of this artist need not be stressed, since it was sufficiently powerful in his Verist days to divide an ancient American institution and install him as teacher. His sharp pen point distilled poison; its intent was to destroy institutions--Church, State, Society, all that the war had corrupted and ruined. The volume of this output is appreciated in this country only now, when some of the numerous folios of drawings, prints, and water colors are on view. In the recent paintings, of which large numbers have been exhibited, it is the apocalyptic atmosphere that is most felt. Its strong affinity with the painting of Van Gogh is one not so much of style as of spirit. "Here, study this ravine," Van Gogh said to Gauguin. "I want to make people feel all the millions of tons of water that have poured down its sides. When I paint a portrait of a man, I want them to feel the entire flow of that man's life, everything he has seen and done and suffered! "The fields that push up, the corn, and the water that rushes down the ravine, the juice of the grape, and the life of a man as it flows past him, all are one and the same thing. The sole unity in life is the unity of rhythm. A rhythm to which we all dance; men, apples, ravines, ploughed fields, carts among the corn, houses, horses and the sun. . . . " When I paint a peasant laboring in the field, I want people to feel the peasant flowing down into the soil, just as the corn does, and the soil flowing up through the peasant. I want to feel the sun pouring into the peasant, into the field, the corn, the plough, the horses, just as they all pour back into the sun. When you begin to feel the universal rhythm in which everything on earth moves, you begin to understand life. That alone is God." This quotation, or improvisation, from Lust for Life, by Irving Stone, seems, at least to one reader, to make the extraordinary atmosphere of the recent, prolific Grosz output understandable. It also leads up to and helps account for the more purely contemporary theme of Raymond Jonson in nonsubject art as he has described it, and further illuminates a painting outlook based on the current conception of nature's structure. Among the Grosz paintings, there are several self-portraits. Memories shows the artist in a not too flattering view, bogged down by circumstances of which he seems wholly unconscious. In Remembering, the symbolism is eloquent. Two figures view two worlds, the world of youth's ambition and that viewed by the mature man as the product of his handiwork. Among significant younger men who are finding traditional art and American realism alike unsuited for what they wish to express about the familiar landscape, there are several who might be included in the classification that begins with Mattson and who might also be seen to carry on a tradition initiated by Ryder. Elliot Orr, William Rowe, Kenneth Callahan, are among them. Some of the finest work from the fertile fancy of Benjamin Kopman is to be mentioned in relation to the contemporary phase of Grosz's painting, as is that of Carl Nelson. Elliot Orr lives at Waquoit on Cape Cod, where he looks out on nature, not through the physical eye nor through the intellect, but through "the soul." His painting The Storm, a somber seascape, was seen by large numbers of people when, in a recent season, it was part of a traveling exhibition of the American Federation of Arts and was shown with a typical Ryder in order to stress a similarity of mood and of effect. "Nature holds for me an emotional or subjective meaning as well as a visual or objective meaning," says this artist. "I always try to unite the two things when I paint. In this way only do I feel that I am fully able to express the reality of my experience. Drawing, color, design, the factual details of nature, are simply the means with which I must work. I do not value any or all of them simply for their objective worth, but rather I use them to the best of my ability to build an imaginative conception of my subject. For this reason I prefer not to paint directly from nature, but simply to make small sketches of things that interest me most. "Later, when one of these sketches becomes identified in my mind with some mood or idea which I wish to express, it becomes the subject of a new picture. My pictures are seldom of any particular place or thing; nearly all of them do, however, have their origin in nature and are the result of thought and feeling associated with experiences of nature. To record this age is not to sit in an orchard and admire a cow." Orr, who studied with George Luks, lives an almost cloistered life, brooding over his pictures, realizing them as forcefully as possible in terms of subjective and emotional mood. Much of his recent work has shown lonely and abandoned houses, floods, storms, and destruction in general through a process of the elements. The Alley is a profound generalization of a nationally felt depression. But this artist, at thirtyfive, is also producing work in contrast with this dark mood and is convinced that "the future of American art is the brightest on the face of the earth--and the past a great deal brighter than we today realize." William B. Rowe of Buffalo, New York, is a young man who was educated as an architect. As a painter, he is conspicuously an independent with the ability to combine sensitive plastic perception with clear and simple statement, and to achieve a very original style as a result. His Hitch Hiker, at the Golden Gate Exposition at San Francisco, is an example of the figure studies where volume and space relationships are expressed with remarkable simplicity and power through reliance mainly upon color organization. These figures are similar in conception to paintings by Carroll and Kuniyoshi. More typical Rowe paintings show a use of black and gray that gives a prevailing effect of monotone. "My creed," he says, "is very simple. I am an American painter striving to express my personal feeling in form. This form is derived from my reactions to the natural and human phenomena everywhere around me. The strongest single influence upon my work has been Chinese art, especially the Sung landscapes and Tang terra cottas. French expressionism, El Greco, and Gothic architecture have influenced me. I want to express something simple, personal, direct in paint-and-form language and keep the actual painting spontaneous and tied to reality not naturalism."