Art: Pre-Easter Height

Manhattan’s art season was at its pre-Easter height, with more than 100 shows to choose from. No single tourist could take in all the city had to offer, but the cream of it could be seen in two or three jumps:

¶ The Whitney Museum displayed sculptures, watercolors and drawings by 172 contemporary U.S. artists. As always with selections of such scope, a good bit was bad. But Burr Miller’s marble Chrysalis showed how a sensitive chisel can tease stone to life, and Saul Baizerman’s Eve proved that it is also possible to hammer life into a sheet of copper. The water-colors ranged from the sweet, wet realism of Californian John Langley Howard’s Coast Line to New Yorker Hans Hofmann’s wholly abstract and strikingly handsome Composition in Red.

¶ The Metropolitan staged a fine exhibition in honor of Manhattan’s Art Students League, which has helped shape U.S. art for 75 years. The Met showed 75 artists who had worked at the league, including such long-dead greats as Thomas Eakins and George Bellows. Masterpieces such as Eakins’ The Concert Singer and Bellows’ Emma and Her Children were U.S. art at its best.

¶ The Wildenstein Galleries presented 35 canvases (TIME, March 12) by one of the greatest artists who ever lived, Peter Paul Rubens.

¶ Gallery-lined 57th Street and its environs offered bronzes by Britain’s Henry Moore (at the Buchholz), Grandma Moses’ bucolic pleasantries (at the St. Etienne), happy bloops and squiggles by Spain’s Joán Miró (at the Pierre Matisse), a fine collection of Ming porcelains (at the Komor), and antiseptic semi-abstractions by Charles Sheeler (at the Downtown). The esoteric fringe, always as long as an Easter bunny’s ears, had a bright item: luminescent pictures by Marie Menken (at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery), which were guaranteed to be visible even in rooms darkened for TV.