Art: Neo-Realism in Paris

When President Vincent Auriol set out last week to open Paris’ big annual art show, the Salon d’Automne, he had no reason to look for any excitement. Even the salon officials admitted that the show, once a thunderous battleground for France’s great art innovators, was pretty tepid stuff. Said the show’s catalogue: “It is probably true that the young men of today no longer have a taste for those violent battles.”

Outside the exhibition in the Grand Palais, however, the President was met by an indignant cabinet member, Andre Marie, Minister of National Education. ”Monsieur le President,” sputtered Minister Marie, “something inadmissible is going on. There are those here who are using this salon to make political propaganda.” President Auriol, thus briefed, refused to open the show until seven offending canvases were removed. Painted in poster style by a Communist group calling themselves “the new realists,” they ranged from Gerard Singer’s “The 14th of February, 1950, at Nice” (see cut), full of Delacroix sound & fury, showing brawling dockers dumping armaments into the Mediterranean, to Marie-Ann Lansiaux’s stiff, wooden-faced workers May Day-parading down a Paris boulevard.

Immediately, both the Communist and conservative press were on the President’s back. Such an act by the government, stormed the Communist Ce Soir, had not occurred since the days of Napoleon III. Said the conservative Figaro: “This is not the first time that samples of proletarian neorealism have been presented at official expositions. Their striking bad faith and mediocre workmanship have brought forth smiles or even good laughs. The regime did not find itself menaced, and it was, in the end, good anti-Communist propaganda . . . The intervention of the police seems clumsy; why make those who are ridiculous into martyrs?”