Art: Trend

Before World War II, it was common practice for U.S. artists either to tout or tear apart “The American Scene.” Last week two big annual shows (the Whitney Museum’s “Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting” and the “120th Annual” of the conservative National Academy of Design) seemed to say that times have changed.

The cultural self-consciousness of prewar years was almost gone. U.S. artists were concentrating more on nature, and on themselves. Instead of the sterilized barnyards of “American Scene” art, there were carefully detailed, out-of-the-way beauties. Instead of hoggish politicians and slack-breasted shopgirls, there were powerfully expressionistic symbols of luxury—with the sting left out—such as Josef Scharl’s rich, melancholy Babylonia.

The National Academy prizewinners were mostly repetitions of familiar tricks. Guy Pène du Bois took top $1,200 honors with Cocktails, a collection of lathe-turned automatons on a lawn. Nevertheless, both shows contained a few really original approaches to painting—for instance, U.S.A. Two Cents a Mile, by a little-known newcomer named Lucia Autoririo. Her abstract organization of the impressions one gets from a train window at night suggested a new way of combining time & space in a picture which stays still.