Art: Party

In a skylit little courtyard gallery on West 13th Street, Manhattan, gathered last week more artistic large fry than you could shake a palette-knife at. Her greying hair done high and sculptural, Hostess Edith Gregor Halpert of the Downtown Gallery swept busily from guest to guest: gentle Alfred Barr Jr., director of the Museum of Modern Art; frosty-headed “Grouch” Goodyear, the museum’s president; Mrs. Juliana Force, redoubtable director of the Whitney Museum; sunny Holger Cahill, director of the Federal Art Project; big, Indian-looking Artist Eugene Speicher, burly, blue-eyed Reginald Marsh, bright-eyed, skimpy-chinned Peggy Bacon, melancholy Morris Kantor, spindly Charles Sheeler.

The well-attended festivities celebrated —and almost obscured—an exhibition of eleven new paintings by one of the pets of the Manhattan-Woodstock crowd. The pet, bespectacled, Japanese-born Artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi, arrived late, grinning and amiable.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi likes black & white touches so much that rare is the Kuniyoshi composition without a magazine, a corner of newspaper, a wrought-iron figure, a brunette en chemise. Another thing he likes is playing with webby threads of paint as a pastry cook plays with icing, to catch the light and give his canvases lustre. His great-eyed, meanderingly drawn figures often seem to exist in a mussy halo of phosphorescence, with vast spaces of mere paint around them. This highly mannered style does not satisfy Kuniyoshi, but it is the first one he has made fully and expressively his own in about 20 years of unhurried painting.

His greatest beauty to date was Summer

Storm (see cut), a fragile swirl of trees, a tethered and terrified stallion and grey space of storm cloud. At 45, accounted one of the dozen most accomplished U. S. painters, Kuniyoshi has begun to make money after years in which he “did everything but commercial art” to keep alive. One thing annoys him: having been born in Japan he cannot become a U. S. citizen.