Pas de Deux

U.S. art has its fair share of angry satirists, men with the sharp eye to puncture pomposity and the meat-ax strokes to level hypocrisy. Manhattan-born Painter Mitchell Siporin, 47, chairman of the fine arts department at Brandeis University, is something rarer--a skilled craftsman who can combine wit with the feeling, technique and imagery of true satirical art. His luminous, thought-provoking watercolor, gouache and crayon imaginary portraits on view this week at the Downtown Gallery make a sprightly contribution to Manhattan's fall season.

Poet & President. Painter Siporin earned his professional spurs with the WPA in the '30s, and with Painter Edward Millman won a $29,000 commission to paint frescoes for the St. Louis Post Office. He served in the European theater with the Fifth Army as a war artist, and after the war he moved in and then out of abstract painting. Today, Siporin feels, there is little freshness in U.S. painting, and few ideas. His own latest works have some of both. Siporin's lively imagination conjured up make-believe dialogues between likely--and some unlikely--famous pairs, then his paint brush concocted the scenes of their meetings.

In Gangster's Funeral Siporin has contrasted razor-thin Artist Jack Levine with menacing, heavyweight Gangster Al Capone, gently satirizing Levine's evocative realism in the process. His Poet and President depicts a performance by the late poet Dylan Thomas, full of pixilating good spirits, cavorting before President Sobersides on the university lecture platform. Serenade from Don Giovanni juxtaposes the rakehell librettist Lorenzo da Ponte and the shy, youthful Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart playing a duet on mandolin and pianoforte. The Denial, portraying Novelist Franz Kafka, his fiancee Dora Dymant, and the rabbi who forbade their marriage because Kafka was not a practicing Jew, is a conversation locked in silence.

Painter & "Friend." Describing his study of Painter Jules Pascin "and Friend." Siporin says: "Pascin is sitting there with this girl . . . One hand is on the model's shoulder and he is drawing with the other hand, as if the sensation of the flesh is moving up one arm, down the other and out through the pencil. It's that intimate." Siporin believes that "anything that is evocative, of intimacy or whatever, is the making of the painting.'' He painted his dialogues "to evoke the intimacy of a creative collaboration. You can sort of be in the room where it is being done."

At their best, Mitchell Siporin's ironical contrasts probe for similarities beneath the skin. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (see cut) sits William Blake and Toulouse-Lautrec down together, each with his own symbol (a cupid emerging from an egg is taken from a Blake illustration; Toulouse-Lautrec is backed by his poster of Jane Avril). Says Siporin. "The idea is sin, in a way. Both men had a very complex notion of sin; both were preoccupied by it, but in different ways. Lautrec's sympathies were with the prostitutes, but he had to have an idea of what was virtue and what was sin in order to have this sympathy.''

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