Art: Big Three

When this year’s Autumn Salon opened in Paris, 30,000 people crowded in the first day. Nowhere else in the world does art mean so much to so many. And no where else do so many artists owe so much to so few. A thousand painters were exhibited in the show; most of them were followers of the three grand old masters of modern art, Matisse (76), Picasso (64) and Braque (63). The exhibition crackled with cubistic beefsteaks, sparkled with brokenly abstract wine bottles, and blazed with serried riots of bright colors, explosively combined.

The Majors. Matisse dominated the show with a roomful of 37 paintings ranging from My First Painting (1890) to a recent Girl in Oriental Costume. Through most of the German occupation the old master had beensick near Nice; he had painted lying in bed. In 1943 his wife and daughter were tortured by the Gestapo on suspicion (justifiable) of helping the underground, but were finally freed. Matisse’s health is still delicate, but he has seldom painted with more youthful boldness and joie de vivre.

A Picasso still life unhelpfully entitled Painting, in white, yellow, pale blue and black, showed that Old Master Picasso still wielded a powerful brush. Forbidden to exhibit during the occupation, he painted every day. Picasso’s message to U.S. artists: “Tell them to work hard — like me.”

Old Master Braque’s Interior, one of the hits of the Autumn Salon, was a solemn rectangle of silence in the general, uproar of the show. Painted almost entirely in black and grey, with a few dabs of orange, its solid, weighty strength made some of the gayer pictures look thin and forced. Braque has been living in unapproachable solitude for the past few years.

Vlaminck, Derain, Segonzac and Despiau were not exhibiting. They belonged to the Groupe du voyage à Berlin (the group that traveled to Berlin). Conspicuously absent non-collaborators were Dufy (frail but still painting in Perignan) and Rouault (secluded in Brittany).

The Minors. André Lhôte, 60-year-old modern, whose cautious cubism has been largely overshadowed by his giant contemporaries, showed a carefully composed Bordeaux in My Youth, which seemed real without being at all realistic.

Other standouts: a competently sumptuous Nude at the Mirror, by Georges Capon; Edouard Goerg’s fuzzy, dreamy Midnight Bouquet, reminiscent of the 19th-Century Romanticist Odilon Redon; and Astarté, by André Marchand. Marchand, in his 30s, is considered one of the “younger” painters. His picture of green flesh, black water and blue sand was startling in a show full of surprises. The most surprising thing about it was that he had painted the sky blue.