Art: Whitney Thermometer

The handsome Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan does not like to think of itself as a mere repository for modern U. S. paintings. From its fat endowment it has bought throughout Depression far more pictures than it needed or could show as the kindest, most practical form of unemployment relief. It gives lectures. It publishes books. It encourages talent. And it is no more democratic than the Italian Government. Founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and her good friend Juliana Force, with a board of directors of their own choosing, run the gallery exactly as they see fit. Every other year they give an Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. The third such exhibition opened last week, with one painting apiece from 153 artists.

The Whitney biennial has no jury, no admissions committee. Autocratically it invites each U. S. artist whom it considers worthy of the honor to submit the canvas that he considers most typical of his recent work. Though no prizes are given the show is not without its rewards, because the museum has set aside a fund ot $20,000 to buy pictures for its own collection. Almost all the other canvases are for sale.

Because Director Force’s taste is as impeccable as her temper is robust, the Whitney biennial has acquired, with the passing years, an added importance. It has become about as accurate a thermometer as critics have to show the temperature and trends of current U. S. painting. Reading the Whitney thermometer as of last week it might be said that abstract painters and technical experimenters are rapidly vanishing. Most present-day artists are now concerned with such Americana as lynching, unemployment, militarism, middle-class stupidity, lower-class squalor. Dozens of able artists have in 1934 found bread lines and burlesque shows more interesting than bunches of zinnias in a pewter vase.

Along with Charles Sheeler’s Shaker Buildings, Georgia O’Keeffe’s This Autumn, Thomas Benton’s Over the Hill, Leon Kroll’s Road Through Willows, Edward Hopper’s East Wind Over Weehawken, Henry Billings’ Martha’s Vineyard Sound, Reginald Marsh’s Coney Island Beach and Grant Wood’s Arbor Day, one canvas is notably eyeworthy: John Steuart Curry’s The Fugitive, in which a terrified half-naked Negro hides against a tree trunk from a lynching mob while two red butterflies drift past his feet.

Outstanding among the artists who find just plain painting sufficient excitement is Eugene Speicher. His portrait of “Red” Moore, a brawny New England blacksmith seated in a Windsor chair by his anvil, preached no message at all, was a bargain , for any collector at any price.