International: Island of Peace?

U.N. has 3,475 servants in its employ, who have sworn loyalty to its vague sovereignty, live far from home, work hard, and—amid the noble words and great issues raging about them—lead lives of quiet irritation. This week some of these forgotten men & women got a small place in the limelight. At Lake Success, U.N. opened an exhibition of 200 paintings by secretariat members. The pictures gave interesting insights into the preoccupations of people who, sometimes more than the windy statesmen, are U.N.

Some of the amateur artists had worked into the canvases their feelings (mostly bitter, sometimes awed) about the great strange city which is their official home. There was the riot of Times Square at night, the dark sky aglow with the reflected fire of the neon signs (by Claude Bottiau, a young Breton who works in an office supply room at Lake Success); the naked sidewalks of 17th Street, and the inside of a bare room with an iron stove (by IndoChina’s Tao-Kim Hai, an expert in U.N.’s trusteeship division).

There was a pencil drawing of the late Count Bernadotte, laughing, and an oil painting (by the U.S.’s George Francis) of Surjit Singh, an Indian, who works in the Security Council Library and is famed for his pale pastel turbans. One picture (by Denmark’s Olav Mathiesen) of a shy nude and a knight was called Chaucer—Woman in Bath; Mexico’s Victor Manzanilla-Schaffer, of U.N.’s narcotics division, contributed an abstraction which looked like a one-eyed blob of ectoplasm, called Ritmo (Rhythm). Asked a wag: “What’s that? It looks like UNESCO.”

A few of the international civil servants were perturbed by the state of the world. Denmark’s Ole Svend Hamann showed a surrealist living room with a man sitting beside a radio, reading a newspaper. From his pipe rises a mushroom-shaped atomic cloud. “What is a home?” reads the picture’s caption. “An island of peace where the native language is that of affection. But what alien shapes are created by the invasion of newsprint and airwaves.”

The most wistful of all the works of art was a sample of Chinese calligraphy which read: “By chance I saw a short purple jade flute; I know not how to summon music therefrom, yet in my memory rises an airy song of love.”