Art: Academy

Like New York’s lamented Bank of United States, the National Academy of Design impresses men of simple faith by the grandiose sound of its name. Again like the Bank of U. S. it has long been heartily damned by the cognoscenti, though unlike the crashed bank, nothing could possibly be more respectable than the academy. Last week the National Academy of Design flung wide its doors for a 106th annual exhibition. A great many people crowded in. Last November, stung by the scorn of younger critics, the Academicians and their Associates limited the show to their own works. This display of energy was not maintained last week. Beside the exhibits of 75 N. A.’s. and 79 Associates, works were accepted from 199 proletarians.

Praiseworthy were Gifford Beal’s Men with Lobster Pots; Leon Krolls portrait of a baby; Lizabeth Paxton’s Deshabille; Ernest Lawson’s Colorado Ranch. Of the show as a whole, New York Times Critic Edward Alden Jewell commented: “It often seems as if these artists had been snowed under in the blizzard of 1888—whose 43rd anniversary has just been marked—and emerging at last from the drifts were to be seen taking up life again just where they left it. Most of the sculpture is too discouraging for words.”