Art: Pictures on Parade

On the principle that good neighbors should hand pictures of themselves across the sea, Nelson Rockefeller’s Committee for Cultural Relations with Latin America is shipping boatloads of good modern U.S. art from one Latin-American capital to the next. Earlier this summer, shows opened in Mexico City and Buenos Aires.

Last week a third caravan of contemporary U.S. paintings set up its wares in Bogotá, capital of Colombia.

On opening night, Bogotá’s exhibition attracted 600 distinguished Colombians, including President Eduardo Santos. The audience quickly found a favorite in Eugene Speicher’s elegant portrait of Katharine Cornell, delighted in a realism U.S. films had not taught them to expect. Said Bogotá’s El Tiempo next morning: “The exhibition opens a new phase in U.S. relations with Latin America which till yesterday had been a vain exercise of rhetoric.”

> In Mexico City, where another show opened early last month, U.S. painting was not such a novelty; but 30,000 people saw the show in a month. Peasants—and there were plenty—who found their way into the lofty, ornate Palace of Fine Arts, exclaimed at discovering that U.S.

housewives swing their washing high over city courtyards, that U.S. farmers use four wheels instead of two for their wagons. Darrel Austin’s stalking Puma was a popular favorite. Bullring patrons fancied Fletcher Martin’s rousing Embrace—a cowboy being tossed by a steer.

Serious critics like Justino Fernandez took the exhibition seriously, granted that mastery of medium was apparent, but complained that U.S. painters seemed to lack the common ideal of experience or perception needed to elevate their work to authentic art. One writer thought only the water colors saved the show. Diego Rivera, massively present at the opening, complained at the absence of Negro, Indian, Chinese influence—which he considers the most important elements in North American civilization.

> In Buenos Aires, with Acting President Ramón Castillo and his Joseph-coated bodyguard on hand, a fashionable crowd first saw the exhibition in the floodlit National Museum of Fine Arts on July Fourth eve. The Argentines were impressed. Led by U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Somerville Pinkney (“Kippy”) Tuck, porteños traipsed from room to room, occasionally spotting a familiar picture (“Look, a Benton!”), noticing that U.S. art owed as much as theirs to French influence. The Argentines too liked Eugene Speicher’s polished portraits. Art and amity were equally served by Bellows’ painting of Luis Angel Firpo knocking Dempsey out of the ring. The critics, suave and gracious in the Argentine tradition, contented themselves with polite praise in sonorous Castilian.

This week, with attendance averaging over 4,000 a week, and the press devoting columns of space to it, the Buenos Aires show drew to a close. It moves next to Montevideo, then to Rio. The Mexico City exhibition goes next to Santiago, Lima, Quito; the Bogotá show will travel to Caracas and Havana. By year’s end Nelson Rockefeller’s convoys will have visited ten Latin-American capitals.