Art: Fairs & Furbelows

Two great international fairs, each intended to express the most harmonious, inventive, powerful and beautiful elements in U. S. life, each likewise dedicated to the improvement of business in its locality and each scheduled to open in 1939, are now a-building—one on Long Island’s Flushing Meadows and the other on a sandy (“Treasure”) island in San Francisco Bay. Last week, controversy put them both in the news.

¶ Month ago President Grover Whalen of the New York World’s Fair Corporation found himself besieged by Manhattan artists. Their grievance: that the Fair had failed to allocate ground or building for an art exhibition (TIME, Feb. 7). Last week Mr. Whalen and his directors faced growing criticism from another quarter. On view at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art were two sets of pictures, contrasted with a minimum of comment: 1) sketches for houses of the familiar “modern Colonial” type in a “Town of Tomorrow” planned to cover ten acres at the New York World’s Fair; 2) photographs of a community of handsome houses built in a modern style outside Stuttgart, Germany, in 1927 by European Architects van der Rohe, Gropius, Corbusier, Oud. “Tomorrow Looking Toward Yesterday?” queried the Museum’s neat display.

For several weeks the same museum has shown a roomful of photographs of “Fallingwater,” Frank Lloyd Wright’s new house at Bear Run, Pa. (TIME, Jan. 17). Sealed in the masonry of this building is a burlap bag containing comments by well-known Pittsburgh architects on the plans, few of whom thought it could be built successfully. It was built so successfully that many a gallerygoer has been led to wonder how the New York World’s Fair, like the Chicago Fair before it, has managed to ignore Architect Wright. Last week in the New Yorker Critic Lewis Mumford spoke out on this point in a review of Weight’s latest work. “These . . . houses show Frank Lloyd Wright at the top of his powers, undoubtedly the world’s greatest living architect, a man who can dance circles around any of his contemporaries,” said Mr. Mumford. “Architecturally . . . the chief claim of the World’s Fair on the attention of posterity will be the preposterous fact that Wright was not called in to design it.”

¶ Objection to any work of art because it shows a nude body is an outworn gag, but still good for newspaper copy. Last week Executive Director Harris De Haven Connick of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, strenuously made that objection to four pieces of Exposition sculpture. No publicity seeker, forthright Mr. Connick objected to other pieces as artistically inadequate, in which he was at least partially right.

Resentful of the New York Fair, which will be twice as big, San Franciscans point out that their fair buildings are costing slightly more to the acre than the eye-fillers on Flushing Meadows. One item in this cost is presumably the quantity of sculpture with which San Francisco’s non-modernist but imposing buildings will be adorned. No less than 20 local sculptors had been working undisturbed with the exposition architects, until meaty Irishman Connick, who was chief engineer for the 1915 San Francisco fair and later finance chairman of Famous Players Lasky Corp., became executive director fortnight ago.

With one projected piece of sculpture Mr. Connick had no quarrel: the monumental, distinguished design for a new goddess, Pacifica (see cut), which San Francisco’s veteran Ralph Stackpole modeled to be the exposition’s 70 ft. cynosure. But Mr. Connick remarked of Abundance, a nude male figure by David Slivka, that it looked more like a failure of the fig leaf crop; of Occident & Orient, two female nudes by Jacques Schnier, that they would be barred from burlesque; of South American Woman Grinding Corn by Cecilia Graham, that it should be called Woman Bet-Loser Shoving a Peanut With Her Nose.