Art: Relief Work

Twenty-five years ago, the Manhattan drama season always seemed to open on Labor Day, with the late John Drew descending a grand staircase of the Empire Theatre in something by Arthur Wing Pinero. No such impressive starting gun has ever inspired the art world, but for the past two years a modest parallel has existed in the annual shows of Government-inspired art held in Manhattan early in September. At these exhibitions taxpayers are given some idea of what unemployed artists and others on WPA rolls are producing for their money.

Last week’s show was held on the impressive premises of the Museum of Modern Art, embellished with one of the elaborately illustrated catalogs for which this Rockefeller-supported museum is famed. Limited to work paid for by the Federal Government and produced during 1935-36 exhibits by 171 artists were presented.

As usual, the mass of the exhibits were exercises in mediocrity. Such artists as Sculptor Concetta Scaravaglione, Muralist James Michael Newell, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Aaron Bohrod and a sprinkling of others were able to produce work which seemed, by contrast, superb. An innovation was a new department entitled Index of American

Design. Its purpose is to employ artist-draughtsmen to visit collections of U. S. antiquities, make careful drawings of furniture, chests, ironware, pottery, costumes, etc., for distribution to schools and colleges. As last year, a sizeable section was set apart for the work of children in state-supported institutions. Some of their output, particularly the sculpture, was better than that of the adults. Outstanding were a plaster head of a miner by 15-year-old Mike Mosco; a stone buffalo by 11-year-old Antony de Paolo, who was run over and killed by an automobile few weeks ago, and a watercolor of a vixenish young lady in a little veil, painted by 10-year-old Donald Liguore of the Boys’ Welcome Home and entitled Going to Town.

Discovery of the year was a 28-year-old Spanish-American from Taos, N. Mex. named Patrocino Barela, with an instinctive talent for wood carving. He presented a number of bultos, which are Southwestern religious carvings, each whittled from a single block of wood. To the most ambitious of these, a 14-in. stump of native pine carved into simplified interlocking trees and figures representing the Hope or Four Stages of Man, Whittler Barela appended his own explanation:

“Man is born and created by laws of nature, so he born all by himself and then he hope for that hope he has been waiting, and then comes Number 2, which means it is a son which has been reproduced by him and it only half the man he should be, but then he grown up to a man and that signifies Number 3. Numbers 2 and 3 make a complete man and he grows up like the tree that is by his side— large and strong in life, full of happiness and full of hope. But then comes Number 4—that man is growing older, he has gone through life, he has worked and struggled, now he is old, tiresome, and weak. Same way with the tree by his side. . . .

“A man lives four different kinds of life in his life; when he is boy and when he is a young man, and then middle man, and then an old man, and those have been my ideas to carve a Bulto so as to represent the life of man in these carvings.”