Abstract Expressionism

Giles Auty's life has frequently been changed by abrup circumstance.It happened first when he was about 25 and a successful advertising executive who really wanted to be a painter. It took a near-fatal car crash to make him confront himself, but he did.He quit his job and moved to Cornwall. In the 1950s, that was where artists went; it was cheap and dramatically beautiful on the eve of the ascendancy of abstract expressionism and the likes of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.But abstract expressionism was a language in painting unappealing to Giles Auty, which is not to say he was unaware of what modernist artists were after with their abstractions and aversion to figurative or traditional forms of expression.

Brice Marden has been called a romantic and a minimalist. He himself traces his roots to abstract expressionism, and some of his imagery can be related to classical architecture, seascape, phases of the moon. If a visit to the retrospective of his prints at the Baltimore Museum of Art reveals that there's something in all of those assessments, it also reveals that there's more in some than in others.At first glance the work of the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s certainly looks minimalist; there are grids that look like graph paper, there are squares or broad stripes of black and white.

In his foreword to Brenda Richardson's superb study of the Cone sisters, ''Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta,'' Baltimore Museum of Art director Arnold Lehman goes to some length to point out ''the pride and pleasure with which this museum houses the Cone Collection and preserves it for future generations.''Trenchant irony isn't like Mr. Lehman, usually the most effervescently congenial of souls, but how else is one to take that ''pride and pleasure'' statement? For the sorry truth is that ever since the Cone Wing opened in 1957, the museum's curators have, in virtually continuous succession, treated the collection in a manner that can, with charity, only be called insulting.

Nowadays we get so much content-laden art that a non-issue-oriented show seems almost a rarity. We get so much installation art, video art, furniture art and other kinds of non-traditional art that a pure painting show can create a sense of nostalgia. Add in that the paintings by the three artists featured this month at School 33 are abstract, and we seem to have stepped back into another era altogether.If they share abstraction, however, their approaches to it are not the same. Lisa R. Smith's paintings, with their thick surfaces, deep colors and organic shapes, reveal a kind of expressionist abstraction.

A new name to reckon with on the Baltimore art scene i Spanish artist Salvador Bru, who is having his first local exhibit at the C. Grimaldis Gallery's Morton Street location. Not much contemporary Spanish art is shown in our area, so there should be plenty of curiosity in this case.Bru has lived for a long time in the United States and often exhibited in this country and in Europe. He now lives in Washington and keeps a studio in Baltimore.Looking at his new work takes one back to the surrealism-tinged abstract expressionism of the 1940s.