Art: New Season

Come to judgment in Manhattan last week and this were the works of more than 50 U. S. artists of all ages, regions and schools, salted with a sprinkling of solid or exotic Europeans. In the lot were no new efforts by the three lusty young men from the West—Benton, Curry and Wood—by whom contemporary U. S. painting is best known to the man in the street. Fresh examples of surrealism were not in evidence, the familiar ones being stock-in-trade with Manhattan dealers or on loan exhibitions in the eager Midwest. But among many pictures by young artists, critics recognized a few of well-founded ability and vivid promise.

Southern Star, In the last 20 years the South has produced fiercely regional literature by the bale, but almost no first-rate painters. This week one star risen from the bayous was shining bright in an exhibition at the Boyer Galleries of 19 paintings by 26-year-old John McCrady of New Orleans, his first one-man show in Manhattan. Born and bred in the South, John McCrady came north when he won one of the ten national scholarships to Manhattan’s Art Students’ League in 1933. The unusually cold winter depressed him. He quit going to classes, stayed in his room hugging the radiator and telling himself he was no good until one day he began to paint down home scenes out of his imagination. Since that year he has stayed in Mississippi and Louisiana and painted what he knows.

Since he finished Swing Low, Sweet Chariot a year ago, slight, clear-headed Artist McCrady has been unaffected by the disposition of everyone who has seen it to make it the McCrady trademark. He has continued to do beautifully colored and dramatic canvases of small Southern towns and cotton country, is now at work on a picture called Judgment Day which will contain no less than 500 figures. An obviously gifted draughtsman, McCrady gets his luminous effects by “under-painting,” working in transparent color glazes on a warm, umber ground. Tender, fully imagined, though not profound, his Negro paintings appear as authentically melodious as the Kansas paintings of John Steuart Curry are authentically robust.

Wandering Chicagoan. At the Rehn Gallery, Chicagoan Aaron Bohrod, 29, showed new and better work than the half-comic paintings of sleazy Chicago scenes by which he is known. Pontificated New York Times Critic Edward Alden Jewell: “Between the minor if vaguely haunting tightness of those minutiae and the ripe, fluent graciousness of the present work, a vast difference publishes itself.” Still this side of graciousness but studied with uncommon depth were Aaron Bohrod’s new subjects: poor whites, exhausted interiors of tourist cabins, a trailer camp, a sidewalk in New Orleans.

Twelve. At the Downtown Gallery, twelve ambitious young U. S. painters were represented by their best work of the year. From Boston, where he was born in 1915, Jack Levine sent the most powerful canvas in the show, a Street Scene with three dreamlike, prodigious figures. As elegant as this was rough, The Various Spring by O. Louis Guglielmi, 31-year-old New Yorker, showed three identical blue-shirted workmen climbing maypoles to reach gift platters in each of which reposed a little dead Madrileno.

Charmer, The School of Paris, which was not a school but an atmosphere in which the teachers of most of the best current painters were taught, was recalled to Manhattanites by an exhibition at the Findlay Galleries of 30 paintings by Montparnassian Moise Kisling. A fiery Polish Jew, friend for 20 years of such notable scapegraces as Utrillo, 46-year-old Kisling surprised gallery-goers with his weight of opulent color and delicate draughtsmanship. Included were two nudes of Kiki, catlikeQueen of the Paris models, who once called Kisling “the swellest guy in the world,” now sings sailor songs in her own Paris cafe.

Portraitists. Three European portraitists, two serious and one not, showed their wares to prospective patrons. At the Newhouse Galleries Austrian Dario Rappaport, skilled painter of such illustrious opposites as Frank B. Kellogg, Benito Mussolini, Pope Pius XI and Bebe Daniels’ grandmother, took the palm for traditional solidity. At the Marie Sterner Galleries Arthur Kaufmann, capable and colorful German emigre, showed character studies of the late George Gershwin, Luise Rainer as a plain and pensive 17-year-old in Düsseldorf. At the Georgette Passedoit Gallery were 23 oddities by a healthily impudent 21-year-old Danish girl named Isa Neuhaus. In the U. S. for one year, she has had 20-minute sittings with Bishop Manning, painted subtly all in mauve; Leslie Howard, all in green; Mayor LaGuardia, all in red.

Ceramics. Sanctiora auro, certe innocentiora* wrote Roman Pliny of the ceramic statues of the Etruscans. Far from sacred but often fine were the 142 examples of U. S. ceramic art with which the Whitney Museum opened its season this week. Assembled last year by the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts for showings in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and England, the collection included sculptures in terra cotta and enamel by the artists who have revived ceramics as a fine art in the U. S.—Waylande Gregory of Metuchen, N. J., Henry Varnum Poor of New York, Cleveland’s Russell Barnett Aitken, whose Europa, a jolly maiden atop a jolly, ogling bull, well illustrated the fresh, light-hearted tendency of this medium.

*”More sacred than gold, and a damn sight less harmful.”