Art Chronicle
A SEASON OF ART
T
HE usuAL ACTIVITY
of the New York art season has been punctuated
.this year by the renewed showing of artists from abroad. After a
lapse of five years, the good work that turned up from Europe was, with
one or two exceptions, from the old and established masters of modern
art. Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Bonnard, Rouault, and Miro were seen
either in one-man shows or individual pictures, and there were exhibi–
tions of such lesser luminaries as Berard, Delvaux, Leonid, and Magritte.
The Whitney Museum's guest showing of the younger French painters
proved disappointing, and a surprise only in the unexpected frankness of
its derivations. The canvases of Francis Gruber and Lucien Coutaud
suggested that they were more worthy of one-man shows than Andre
Marchand, who was given one. In contrast to his skilled and tasteful
compositions, Dubuffet's exhibition struck a new and devil-may-care
note that was a relief from too much knowledgeable painting. All this
but emphasized that however one may rate contemporary American art
in the absolute sense, here, as elsewhere, this country has a more im–
portant international burden to carry.
The outstanding group shows were the Museum of Modern Art's
Fourteen Americans
in September, and the annual Whitney exhibition of
contemporary painting. To these must be added the Pepsi-Cola show,
which through prizes and publicity has taken on an importance not
warranted by its quality. Its awards are a beautiful example (not with–
out honor in
art
reviews), of treating all styles of current painting as if
they were equally worthy of attention, picking the best picture in each
class and giving it a blue ribbon. This year was no exception; there was
something for every style, and the honest preference of the Company,
or what the Company thinks the "public wants" was expressed in its
calendar, where almost every style was left out. The prize-winning pic–
ture-What Avomic War Will Do to You-was
cleverly chosen for its
topicality; itself an aesthetic disaster, it was less effective as propaganda
than any war photograph.
The
Fourteen Americans
at the Museum of Modern Art was much
criticized on the grounds that no consistent basis for selection-age, or
locality, or stylistic direction, or even recent discovery-could be dis–
cerned among the chosen artists, whose styles ran all the way from pure
