Art: Chicago’s 37

The ponderous, granite-grey Chicago Art Institute is harboring a surprise package: an exhibition billed as “Art of the United Nations.” The show has nothing whatever to do with the war or with international good neighborliness. Behind the cosmic billing is a carefully selected, beautifully presented variety showing of old (2200 B.C.) and new (1943) paintings, sculpture, textiles, ceramics—37 timeless works of art from 37 nations. It took a solid year of planning, promoting, wangling* to round up this multimillion dollars’ worth of fine art, mostly from U.S. collections. Some of the best items:

¶ Flemish Pieter Breughel the Elder’s riotous, sexy The Wedding Dance, one of the world’s best loved old-master paintings.

¶ A shimmering, moody Chinese Sung Dynasty landscape painted on silk, called A Fisherman’s Abode after the Rain.

¶ Morro, a contemporary landscape with figures, by Brazil’s No. 1 modern Painter Candido Portinari.

¶ A sinuous, flowing, Indian bronze, Dancing Siva, dating from about 1400.

¶ Chicago Art Institute’s own great modern painting by the 19th-Century French Artist Georges Seurat—Sunday Afternoon on Grande Jatte Island, often called the finest single picture of its period.

Because exhibitions as varied in content as “Art of the United Nations” depend considerably on good showmanship, the Institute hired a topnotch designer to install it: 37-year-old, Hungarian-born Gyorgy Kepes (pronounced Keppish), now teaching at Brooklyn College. It was his idea that an antique Persian medallion carpet should hang free from the wall, emblazoned with lights; that Seurat’s huge Grande Jatte should be isolated, hung low, placed near a miniature formal garden which complemented the painting’s colors; that an Aztec Goddess of Death be mounted on a hillock with rocks, gravel, cacti. Kepes’ eye for impact value rates much of the credit for the show’s success.

* The National Gallery in Washington, which had never lent one of its Mellon paintings, finally yielded to Chicago cajoling, sent Gilbert Stuart’s Portrait of Mrs. Richard Yates in a Pullman drawing room with the National Gallery assistant director for company.