Art: Americans Abroad

U.S. painting did not seem to be making much of a hit abroad last week. At Venice’s “Biennale,” the U.S. pavilion (featuring the wild & woolly abstractions of Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock —TIME, June 12) was getting silent treatment from the critics. It was even worse in London, where a U.S. exhibition of “symbolic realists” (Paul Cadmus, Peter Blume, Walter Murch, Andrew Wyeth, et al.) was on; there the critics spoke up.

Wrote Critic Eric Newton: “These American pictures catch the eye in a flash, but they are empty.” Said the Sunday Observer: “This term ‘symbolic realism’ is found to embrace the phosphorescent skeleton paintings of Pavel Tchelitchew; a horrific problem picture by Alton Pickens, of the crowning of a dyed ape . . . and Henry Koerner’s surrealist picture [TIME, March 27] of a barber playing the violin to his shrouded customers and a monkey—an entertainment which no doubt explains the increased cost of hairdressing in American establishments. Most of these paintings have been worked over again and again with fine and feeble brushstrokes, in the manner of late Victorian anecdotal art, and it is disheartening to find so much labor expended to produce the mildest electric shocks.”

The last word, as usual, came from Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, who loves to give the American head a kindly pat. Wrote he in the Listener: “The best analogy that I can find for the peculiar American-ness of such painters … is to compare their products to those of American automobile makers . . . American cars are well-designed and well-built, sleek and shiny, and they are very comfortable, as cars go.”