Art: From Paris

For four years the art circles of three continents have wondered what was happening to the artists in occupied Paris. What had become of the famed Paris School of modern painting branded “decadent” by the Nazis? Was there a new, underground art movement? Were there many new paintings by such modern masters as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse? Last week the curtain was beginning to lift. French-made color reproductions of new work by Matisse, Picasso, Bonard and some younger men had been flown across the Atlantic. The portfolios (called Editions du Chene) established two points: 1) the older artists had done considerable work, had not changed markedly in style; 2) the younger painters had followed modern traditions.

Matisse had been painting tanned, voluptuous young girls such as his Dancer in Blue Dress. His Woman in Veil was top-form and more familiar in subject: bold, exuberant painting in sensuous flesh pink decorated with gay scrolls and dots.

Picasso still experimented with his own brand of cubism, and distorted figure painting. Woman in Blue Waist showed a seated figure against soft green. Woman in Armchair added to Picasso’s cubism a pinwheel-and-tinsel fantasy.

Producer of the portfolios is 25-year-old Maurice Girodias, son of an Englishman who published advance-guard writers in between-wars Paris. Girodias got most of his paper from the black market, foiled German authorities by simply leaving town when his work appeared.