Art: Summer’s Fruits

One reason the art “season”‘ begins in Manhattan at the end of Septemberis that by that time prospective buyers are back in town. Another good reason is that most artists do their biggest wad of work in the summer, have it ready for exhibition in the autumn. By last week the first fruits of the old season were already tumbling into the lap of the new.

Juicy & Nocturnal. At the gallery of tall Bostonian Hudson D. Walker, watercolors by quiet Harry Glassgold pleased visitors with their dexterity and light-filled colors. In several of them 30-year-old Artist Glassgold got away with a few Marin tricks of shorthand with unusual impunity. Most critics accounted his work more lively if not more accomplished than the watercolors which Dealer Walker hung up this week by 28-year-old, waggish Stuyvesant Van Veen. Typical of his dry, ingenious work were half-a-dozen “nocturnes”‘ of New England small towns, among them Peterborough Backstreet (see cut).

Abstract & Shiny. At the Greenwich Village A.C.A. Gallery of Herman Baron, patron of proletarians, an exhibition of work by eight young sculptors contained some of the best and some of the worst artistic efforts seen in that neighborhood in years. In the first category were Isamu Noguchi’s Monument to Benjamin Franklin, gay, shiny and abstract suggestion of key, kite and lightning; Vladimir Yoffe’s Design for Keystone, a powerfully carved hunk; and Milton Hebald’s bronze Girl Walking (see cut), a 12-in. figure which almost anybody would like. Critics thought it a promising departure for young Mr. Hebald.

Vital. “All fine works of art are vital, not with the vitality of topical social problems but with the vitality which seems to make a picture alive. . . .” Thus some-what unnecessarily announcing himself as a non-social painter, Victor de Pauw displayed 30 paintings at the Charles Morgan Gallery. Most were good & alive, though many were over facile. A great source of vitality to Artist de Pauw: circuses, and especially clowns. Unlike his great predecessor in this field, Toulouse-Lautrec (see below), Artist de Pauw composes better than he draws.