Art: Forty Fair Art

Visitors to New York’s 1940 World’s Fair found plenty of art to look at. Those who were not saturated by the outdoor murals or stunned by streamlined or super-colossal statuary could exercise their eyes at two big shows: Masterpieces of Art and American Art Today.

Masterpieces of Art. With only nine pictures retained from last year’s superb collection of Old Masters (including Raphael’s Giuliano de’ Medici, Chardin’s Still Life with Hare), this year’s 373 items are an all-U. S. collection. Result: far fewer (and not the best examples) of the greatest Old Masters (six Rembrandts instead of 19; five Hals instead of 16; nine Rubens instead of 19; two Titians instead of eight). No excuses needed to be made for this year’s ten Goyas (including the brilliant, lesser-known tapestry cartoon Confidences in a Park), nor for the six El Grecos, which included The Charcoal Blower (see cut), with its dramatic flame yellows, luminous and velvety.

But out of war’s blockade came the show’s real excitement: as fine a collection of 19th-Century French painters as could be got together anywhere: exceptionally well-selected Delacroix, Corots, Courbets, Daumiers, eleven Renoirs, a dozen Cezannes, four top-notch Gauguins, over a half-dozen each of Van Gogh, Degas, Manet, a generous sample of Henri Rousseau, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec.

American Art Today. Sponsored by the WPA Federal Art Project, the American Art Today exhibit is bigger and perhaps better than its predecessor. Seven of the rambling building’s 20 galleries were reserved for guest exhibits to be changed every three weeks; the remaining 13 sections of WPA work will be replaced twice this summer by new collections. Thus, as opposed to last season’s 1,214 permanent items, the gallery expects to show 3,103 paintings and statues, 1,875 of them by such familiar figures as Paul Cadmus, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Aaron Bohrod.

WPAintings now on display, some old, some new, picked from all over the U. S., showed the same lack of freshness, the same dearth of originality as the bulk of last year’s show. Typical were desolate factories, ramshackle houses, dust-bowl farms, human derelicts.

Popular were the galleries where young artists worked at their painting and chiseling; more consequential were the sections housing the water colors of the huge Index of American Design. Photographic in detail, these pictures are part of the only authentic and comprehensive catalogue of the products of U. S. craftsmen from 1700 to 1900; include among their subjects such diverse items as Victorian bustles, old stone crocks, tavern signs.