Art: Art Week

Last week leg-weary Manhattan art reporters were convinced that few seasons in living memory had produced so much bustle and stir. While the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art were ready to spring big shows of U. S. paintings, the number of important small shows and other events left up-to-the-minute-keepers far behind. Samples:

¶Hung in the Wildenstein Galleries was the best private collection of iSth-Century French art in the world. The lifelong accumulation of San Francisco-born David David-Weill, president of the Council of the National Museums of France, senior partner of the international banking house of Lazard Freres & Cie , this anthology of fragilities changed hands last March. The reported price of $5,000,000 paid by happy Dealer Georges Wildenstein established him firmly as the French Duveen.

¶Nearest 20th-century equivalent to the reveries of Watteau are the paintings of a gangling, red-haired feminine exquisite, now 52, who has lived and painted in Paris for 30 years. Last week the Findlay Galleries gave Marie Laurencin her first sola show in Manhattan in five years. A cadenced critique by Vanity Fair’s onetime editor, Frank Crowninshield, defended from the charge of “boudoir art” Marie Laurencin’s pale, obsessive ladies, “with those undefined pools of night which are their eyes, their magnolia-soft cheeks, their plumes of periwinkle blue and lips of fadeless rose.”

¶Brought out by the Knight Publishers and on sale last week at $50 was a portfolio of twelve paintings by the most renowned woman painter in the U. S., Georgia O’Keeffe. Approved even by irascible Husband Alfred Stieglitz, the color reproductions of O’Keeffe’s suave, austere leaves, peonies and roses were comparable to the famed reproductions of Viennese craftsmen.

¶As suave as O’Keeffe but not so austere were the portraits by Russian Pavel Tchelitchew in the swank, palette-shaped Julien Levy Gallery.A studious but fashionable virtuoso, Painter Tchelitchew showed Manhattanites a notable grab bag of tricks, from Byzantine golden backgrounds to the academic delicacies of silverpoint.

¶Metropolitan feature writers got busy when the Midtown Galleries displayed eleven paintings by the proprietor of a beauty parlor on Union Square. Saturnine, mop-headed Paul Mommer, 38, spent his younger days in Luxembourg and in a British prison camp during the War. Afterward he knocked around as a seaman, became a hospital orderly in Manhattan, then a barber. His moody paintings of recollected landscapes, done in the back room of his shop at night, began to impress art critics three years ago, have grown more impressive. Sympathetic customers at the Mommer beauty parlor include Mrs. Norman Thomas and Mrs. Max Eastman, who also paints (TIME Sept. 27).