Art: Watson’s Art Week

U.S. art heaved mightily in an effort to sell itself to the U.S. public in a formal Art Week and the result last week was again disappointing.

Art’s first National Week, last year, was notable for esthetic whoops & hollers, but its main purpose (selling art) was a flop (TIME, Dec. 9, 1940). This year President Roosevelt gave Art Week a new national director, white-haired, diplomatic Thomas J. Watson, president of International Business Machines Corp. and No. 1 salesman of the U.S. business world. Long a private collector who specializes in paintings by oldtime U.S. artists like Winslow Homer and George Inness, Thomas J. Watson has spent the past four years talking art-mindedness to U.S. business, has had his own International Business Machines Corp. go on a spree of art buying and exhibiting that would have shamed many a patron of the Italian Renaissance.

Salesman Watson set about his new job with a will, organized a nationwide businessmen’s committee, got friends like Frank Mayfield, president of the National Retail Dry Goods Association, to talk sales executives and department-store heads all over the U.S. into advertising, displaying and buying U.S. art. At 1,000 sales exhibitions, scattered through 48 States, 30,000 U.S. artists exhibited approximately 130,000 paintings, drawings, etchings, sculptures, bits of handicraft.

Salesman Watson and his friends, aware that most of last year’s sales in Art Week were of works costing not over $25, urged low prices. And this year, as last, shoppers snapped up $5 sketches, etchings and handicraft doodads at 25¢ to $1, raised eyebrows at $2,000 price tags.

At week’s end, when the receipts were counted, New York City had bought $14,843.30; Los Angeles region $17,000; Washington $6,060; Chicago $2,662; San Francisco $780 worth of art. Even Art Week’s most optimistic friends estimated that total sales would top last year’s $100,018.45 by a mere $30,000. Of this over $25,000 represented art bought by I.B.M. or by Salesman Watson himself.