L. KENTWOLGAMOTTCOLUMN:The talented Mr. Kees

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Made up of four paintings and three collages tucked away in Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery's print study room, "Weldon Kees from the PermanentCollection" is hardly a major exhibition.

But it is a valuable reminder of some of the important roles of a university museum, first in recognizing the work of an important artist with local ties and then in advancing the scholarship about that artist.

Born in Beatrice in 1914, Kees is best known as a poet. But he was also an art critic, photographer, filmmaker, musician and painter.

His latter contributions are the focus of the exhibition that is being held to commemorate the University of Nebraska Press publication of "Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury," a collection of critical essays about Kees edited by Sheldon curator Daniel Siedell.

Even though he was a colleague of Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and the other New York painters who made that city the center of the international art world in the '40s and '50s, Kees remains little known as a visual artist.

But he is now gaining the critical recognition he has long deserved.

"I would consider him to be an excellent New York School painter, but not one of the radical artists of the movement,"art historian Irving Sandler told me last year. "If anything, he was closer to Motherwell than to Pollock."

The author of "The Triumph of American Painting," the seminal book on the New York School of the '40s and '50s, also known as abstract expressionism, Sandler is a contributor to "WeldonKees and the Arts at Midcentury" writing "The Irascible Weldon Kees," which details Kees' involvement with the New York School painters' famous protest against the Metropolitan Museum of Art's hostility to advanced American art.

It is important to note that Kees began painting relatively late, having been introduced to avant-garde art in 1943 and picking up a brush the next year.By 1948, he was well enough accepted to have a solo show at the Peridot Gallery, one of the handful of New York galleries that would show the work of the abstract expressionists at that time.

The connection between Kees' art and that of the other New York School painters can easily be seen in the seven works on display at Sheldon.

In his essay in the book, Pollock biographer B.H. Friedmann directly connects Kees' "Untitled (Abstraction,"a 1946 gouache on paper, with Motherwell's 1947 oil "Personage, with Yellow Ochre and White," seeing in them the same use of strong vertical lines and geometric forms.

And it's easy to see a bit of Pollock in the splatters and skeins of paint on 1947's "Miracle," one of two works in the show from the collection of Clay and Beth Smith. But Kees' scattering of paint isn't "all over," covering the entire canvas.Instead it is inside the biomorphic form that typifies his paintings.

That type of form, which uses sweeping lines that curve out from a central space and suggest arms or legs or, perhaps, branches, reappears in "Greek Revival," a 1949 heavily textured painting that seems to use sand or a similar gritty substance in the paint and features globs of bright color on many of the appendages.

It can also be seen in "The Wall," a gray piece from 1949 that uses heavy black lines that is among the darker paintings that Friedmann argues are the artist's best work.

There's also a biomorphic form in one of the collages. But the other two, both from 1951, share a common visual sensibility, with material being pasted or painted over newsprint with block letters allowed to be exposed from below.

In his essay,Sandler says he believes that Kees hasn't received much recognition in part because he left New York in 1950 and fell out of art world attention just when abstract expressionism was coming into its own, in part because his relationship with his painter colleagues had been uneasy and therefore he was easy to overlook, and in part because his work was scattered to various galleries, collectors and institutions following his death (or perhaps disappearance) in 1955.

But both Sandler and Friedmann clearly believe that Kees, along with other "lost Irascibles" JimmyErnst,Fritz Bultman and Hedda Sterne (the only woman in the famous Life magazine picture), are deserving of greater recognition and further study.

In particular, the pair call for a major museum show on Kees and the development of a catalogue raisonne of his work.

The current Sheldon show is small - in 1998, a Kees exhibition at Sheldon featured 27 paintings and seven collages. But it nonetheless supports Sandler and Friedmann's arguments. The works on view are clearly by an artist whose contribution to the New York School need to be given their proper respect and context.

"Weldon Kees from the Permanent Collection" isn't the kind of exhibition that's going to bring hundreds of people off the street into Sheldon.But it provides an opportunity for those interested to see some of Kees' visual art - which is the point of having a collection like Sheldon's.

And together with the publication of Siedell's book, last year's biography "Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees" by James Riedell and a Nebraska Press reissue of his collected poems, the important little show that runs through April 25 becomes part of a renaissance for Nebraska's modernist renaissance man.

Sheldon talk Friday

Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery curator Daniel Siedell will talk about "The Absent Presence of Weldon Kees" during the Sheldon's First Friday opening from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Friday.Siedell will also be available to sign copies of his book "Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury."

Siedell also will give a lecture about Kees as part of a program to be held March 26 at KimballRecital Hall.The program is a fund-raiser to help the University of Nebraska-Lincoln purchase material related to Kees and his career.

A Novel Idea Bookstore will host a reading of Kees' works on March 30, at 7:30 p.m. Among those reading will be Nick Spencer, associate professor of English at UNL and a contributor to "Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury."

Reach L.Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or at kwolgamott@;journalstar.com.