(1) As involving on the part of the artist an effort concretely to project quite immaterial concepts or images (here angels fear to tread, though men have sometimes accomplished incautious miracles).

(2) As revealing the true essence of a material object (thus, “mountain,” or “city”), with little or no inclusion of actual visible and tactile properties.

(3) Creation of symbols based on and, as a rule, in some measure intended to interpret real shapes or forms (for example, African sculpture).

(4) Real objects shorn, in varying degree, of verisimilitude—whether by means of simplification, distortion or what not—and employed as elements in a purely decorative pattern.

(5) Real objects treated, perhaps, scrupulously as such, but so combined in a picture as to make the whole a mental image rather than a piece of natural actuality (for example, some of the nightmares or, upon occasion, the happier dreams of our surréalistes).

(6) Geometrical designs, bearing, often enough, no direct external relationship to specific objects in the natural world, but fulfilling their mission and the artist’s purpose when they enter into the plan of the composition, viewed strictly as such. This type allies itself with, but by no means exhausts, that designated in the first suggestion, above. It is generally decorative also.

Well (and there may be many other salient attributes), we perceive at once that only the hardiest swimmer need be confident of reaching shore in waters so troubled, overlapping and shark-infested as these.

Most of the paintings in the newly opened show at the Marie Sterner Gallery fall, if not with impeccable smoothness, into the fourth classification. They are decorative, employing, with a profusion of the poetic license that is one of art’s indispensable prerogatives, aspects of the “real.” Especially does this apply to the ever delightful color fantasies by Serge Ferat; but as well, no doubt—if with results that cannot be called overly satisfying—to the concoctions by Ebihara and Sanyu. Ebihara, at any rate, has his own curious way with snowstorms and blackbirds. I understand he paints his cottony snow in the gardens of the Tuileries in July, which presumably has some profound philosophic significance. As for Sanyu, when not wasting time on canvases such as “Portrait with Black Gloves” (somehow reminiscent of the pedestrian who is all feet), he can nicely enough dispose his Oriental harmonies.

Marembert, a newcomer, transcends, at will, the decorative. He does not choose to do so in a painting such as “The Stairway,” with its fancifully and rather arrestingly “dematerialized” ladies. “The Bridge,” on the other hand, held to a plan of austere simplification, comes pretty close to being an essay in pure form, though there is also a suave emotional quality—akin, a little, to that of Vlaminck—which keeps it within romantic bounds.

At another gallery, the Montross, we come upon a bit of abstract seeing that is almost sheer, in the sense specified in our second classification. Alternately distributing round the room light Turneresque visions of no great moment and canvases keyed very low (to the Duesseldorf palette, shall we say, with brushwork that recalls Luks and Henri?), Glen Cooper Henshaw all at once darts right up into the stratosphere and, holding fast to the coattails of courage, daubs us a brave nocturnal Broadway that seems very nearly as disembodied as the smile of the Cheshire cat.

If it be rather the geometric than the impressionistic type of abstraction you want, there are the little canvases by Charles G. Shaw in the current group show at the Valentine, commented upon last Sunday. And if such deft exercises in cold logic warm your heart, you can find more cut after much the same pattern down at the Gallery of Living Art, New York University, where this American painter’s one-man show has been on since early in the Summer.