"Galerie Huit: American Artists in Paris 1950-52" at Studio 18 - New York

This deliciously recherche exhibition reunited 21 American painters and sculptors who showed together in Paris a half century ago. Galerie Huit was located in a very small studio at 8, rue St. Julien le Pauvre, across the river from Notre Dame. It fell into the hands of American painter Haywood "Bill" Rivers, who made it into a cooperative gallery. Financed by the artists themselves, it became a space for friends of friends and anyone who turned up. Many did.

With new work hung approximately every fortnight, Galerie Huit showed more than 40 artists during its two years of existence. Many remain unknown today, while a few became relatively famous: Simon Hantai, Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe, Al Held, Jules Olitski, Shinkichi Tajiri and George Ortman. Only the last four mentioned actually had work in this show, but as Held's contribution of two significant paintings attested, Galerie Huit still maintains a curiously strong magic for its alumni. After five decades, seven semi-stars out of 40 is a respectable batting average for any gallery.

But fame was never the point of either the original gallery or this re-creation. Rather, this fascinating reunion party, organized by Tribeca artist and gallery owner Franz Friedrich, combined social and art history. Friedrich asked all the Galerie Huit artists he could track down, or their heirs, to exhibit one recent and one period work. If one could immediately identify which works were from the '50s and which from more recent decades, their continuity was also often impressive. Many styles and modes were represented, from hewn wooden monoliths to CoBrA-style expressionism, kinetic sculpture and lush figuration. Ortman's 1949 painterly box, suitably titled Beginnings, was rich in developmental possibilities; Hugh Weiss's painting of a ship conjured a mystic voyage; and Rivers's early figurative painting of an African-American barbershop was a gem. Rivers's turn to geometric abstraction was revealed by a later work.

The show made tangible the glamour of being an artist in Paris in 1950 (the very year the movie-musical An American in Paris was already cheapening the myth), even if many at the time could only regret having missed the excitement of the '20s. Among the many engaging works on view, special mention should be made of the short film Vernissage, the first effort by animator Carmen D'Avino, one of whose later films was nominated for an Academy Award. It contains a black-and-white sequence of coffee-making that any young video-projection artist would die for.

As is the way with such cultural retrieval and revival, Galerie Huit now crops up everywhere. In the press release for a recent show, feminist painter May Stevens proudly admits to having had her first show there, even if she slipped through the otherwise tight curatorial net of this truly major minor exhibition.

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group