Narrative Painting

TO tell a story, to describe an action, to create memorable characters and recall legendary events was once for painters - as it was for poets - one of the fundamental tasks to which the artistic imagination addressed itself. But just as narrative ceased to be a central concern for the great modernist poets, so did storytelling all but disappear from modernist painting. What had long been the province of poetry and painting was now left to prose and the movies. For the high culture of the modernist era, there was something suspect about straightforward narrative - to such an extent, indeed, that storytelling was often dismissed as a lowbrow interest. It was certainly not something with which an ambitious pictorial talent was any longer expected to be concerned.

Today, however, a number of factors - most conspicuously the decline of modernist orthodoxy and the return to Realism that has followed in its wake - have conspired to revive the whole question of narrative painting. In response to this development the Allan Frumkin Gallery - for years one of the leading champions of the new Realism - has mounted an exhibition called ''Narrative Painting.'' Consisting of 10 new paintings by 10 artists, this exhibition makes the strongest bid we have yet seen for a return to the narrative tradition in painting. But is it strong enough to persuade us that a vital revival of narrative painting is upon us?

For certain painters and their followers, this is a keenly partisan issue just now, and opinions will naturally differ on it. Let us remember, then, that this is by no means the first time that a call for a return to narrative painting has been made. If one is inclined to greet the prospect of such a revival with a certain skepticism, it is precisely because an imminent return to narrative painting has so often been announced and has so regularly proved to be without foundation.

This writer can recall an occasion as far back as 1954, in the very heyday of the New York School, when no less an eminence than Alfred H. Barr Jr., prompted by the recent appearance of Larry Rivers's ''Washington Crossing the Delaware,'' told a gathering at the Artists' Club, that he looked for a return to history painting. Needless to say, it never occurred. Again in the 1960's, the critic and painter Sidney Tillim made a strong case for painting of this persuasion, but again the results were negligible.

What makes the present occasion different, of course, is that we are now dealing with an exhibition full of paintings rather than a polemic full of promises. Yet when we turn to these paintings, their narrative content - the very thing that may be expected to distinguish these paintings from other examples of contemporary Realism - turns out to be something of a problem.

Traditionally, narrative painting draws upon historical, mythological or literary materials for its scenarios of action. But only two of the artists in this show - Alfred Leslie and Bruno Civitico - avail themselves of such materials. Mr. Leslie offers us an episode based on a letter, written in 1774, by the American painter John Singleton Copley. Mr. Civitico draws upon Babylonian mythology to give us an account of ''Pyramus and Thisbe.'' But the Leslie painting is one of the artist's dimmest efforts, and the Civitico is more interesting as a commentary on the styles of de Chirico and Magritte than as a mythological account of doomed lovers. Thus the case for reviving the use of historical and mythological themes in narrative painting remains, at best, moot in this show.

All the other pictures in the exhibition give us narratives drawn from modern life. William Beckman, in the smallest and one of the most effective pictures in the show, depicts the climactic moment in the running of a marathon. It is a very dour picture -the grim figures in it appear to be emerging from a fog-bound industrial landscape - yet one in which a good deal of power has been concentrated in a very small space. The other outstanding pictures here are Michael Berg's ''The Unsolicited Critique,'' a lovely studio scene by an artist whose work is new to me, and James Valerio's ''The Card Trick,'' a dazzling example of Realist art, in which seven figures are grouped in a dramatic attitude that instantly recalls us to the work of Georges de la Tour.

It is upon the work of these three artists that the case for narrative painting rests in this exhibition. It is not, in my opinion, a very strong one. What one admires in these pictures - their construction, their concentration, their technical excellence and the feat of persuasive representation they achieve - seems to owe little or nothing to their narrative focus. The narrative element is, in any case, too slight, too banal, too external to matter very much. The stories that are told in these paintings quite fail to engage our curiosity, and without a strong - indeed, a central - interest in story, there is nothing to distinguish narrative painting of this sort from other, nonnarrative modes of Realist art.

The other artists represented in the exhibition - Paul Georges, Jack Beal, Dana Van Horn, Michael Mazur and James McGarrell - in no way advance the argument for narrative painting by the work they are showing here. Their contributions to the occasion are just not sufficiently realized. It would appear, in any case, that the narrative form, to be effective in painting, requires something that it is now beyond the power of our artists to create on their own - a widely or intensely shared interest in the fate of the figures who are to be depicted in painting. Without that shared interest, narrative painting remains, alas, what in fact it largely is in this exhibition - just another mode of representational art.

''Narrative Painting'' is on view at the Frumkin Gallery, 50 West 57th Street, through April 30.

Other exhibitions this week include: Robert Birmelin (Odyssia, 730 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street): Robert Birmelin is a Realist painter who finds in the squalor and hurly-burly of city life -the low life of the streets - a subject that obviously excites his imagination. What he concentrates on in many of his pictures is the atmosphere of violence, the wayward action, the vulgar color and the sheer momentum that his subject fairly teems with. Yet as painting, his scenes of figures in action are less persuasive - and seem to engage a less considered vein of sensibility - than the more detached cityscapes that also make up an important part of this exhibition. It is in these cityscapes - and most especially in the smaller studies of this theme - that the best painting in this exhibition is to be found. (Through next Friday.)

Daisy Youngblood (Willard, 29 East 72d Street): Working in unglazed fired clay, Daisy Youngblood creates small sculptures in two quite different modes. In the more successful of these modes, animals - a cheetah, a deer, a goat, et al. - are given an appealing sculptural form. Her exquisite empathy for animal life does not extend to the human species, however. In her other mode, where some representation of the human enters into the conception - as in the ''Female Torso'' and ''Hawk-Woman'' - the result is pretty grim.