AMERICANS FOR AMERICANS

AS Americans' interest in their own art heritage keeps growing, museums and galleries are rushing to keep pace. One of the busiest workers in the field is industrial Detroit, now rapidly coming into its own as a major center of American art research.

The leader of this cultural crusade is Edgar P. Richardson. 54, who has been successfully pushing American art among the automakers and manufacturers of Detroit for almost three decades, particularly since he became the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Archives of American Art. This week Detroit's Institute of Arts is staging an ambitious exhibit based on its director's book. Painting in America, published last fall. The result is one of the most comprehensive surveys of American art ever staged.

The collection of 185 paintings and 220 prints, on loan from 75 museums and private collectors, combines a sense of the history and the quality oof American art. The exhibit ranges from the earliest beginnings, with reproductions of 16th century prints done by post-Columbian explorers, to recent abstract paintings, and includes some of Gilbert Stuart's famed portraits of Washington, an engraving by Paul Revere of the Boston Massacre, works by Benjamin West, Washington Allston, Whistler, Sargent, Homer, Eakins and Ryder. What the exhibition plainly shows is that a new school of painting sprang up in the U.S.. one that at times echoes its European origins, but that has its own national imprint and its own peculiar genius.

One of the painters Art Historian Richardson puts on the roll call of the "pioneers" of modern art is the Italian-born New Yorker, Joseph Stella (1879-1946). His abstraction. The Bridge (opposite), is a portrait of steel and sinews, of mind and muscle, of man's power and industrial might. The painting evokes an epoch in the history of American art, a period of revolt against "pretty pictures," of the discovery of a new world for the painter to paint. Applying the new techniques then coming into fashion, Painter Stella chose for his subject that typically American scene, the manmade, industrialized landscape.

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