Viewing page 27 of 37

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

-11-

[[underline]] TRADITIONAL AND MODERN ART VIEWED BY THREE MILLION RUSSIANS AT THE U.S. NATIONAL EXHIBITION IN MOSCOW [[/underline]]

The American National Exhibition, which included a large cultural display, closed in Moscow on September 4 with a record number of nearly 150,000 Russian visitors on the final day.

It is estimated that a total of nearly three million Russians, many of whom travelled long distances, had their first glimpse of American life during the six-week run of the exhibition. Vice President Richard M. Nixon officially opened the exhibition in Sokolniki Park on July 23.

For the Fine Arts section of the exhibition, 49 paintings and 23 works of sculpture by American artists were originally selected as representative of the period 1918 to the present.

Later, the Office of the American National Exhibition in Moscow announced that 26 paintings by outstanding American artists of the pre-World War I period had been obtained on loan from a number of museums and individual collectors.

This collection supplemented the paintings of the last 40 years. Viewed as a whole, the work reflected a broad range of American painting dating from the mid-18th century to the present.

The 49 modern painters chosen were: Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, William Baziotes, Thomas Hart Benson, Hyman Bloom, Peter Blume, Alexander Brook, Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Stuart Davis, William De Kooning, Charles Demuth, Edwin Dickinson, Philip Evergood, Lyonel Feininger, William Glackens, Fritz Glarner, Arshile Gorky, Morris Graves, George Grosz, Philip Guston, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Karl Knaths, Walt Kuhn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, Jack Levine, Conrad Marca-Relli, John Marin, Reginald Marsh, Robert Motherwell, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Abraham Rattner, Mark Rothko, Ben Shahn, Charles Sheeler, John Sloan, Raphael Soyer, Eugene Speicher, Niles Spencer, Joseph Stella, Yves Tanguy, Mark Tobey, Franklin Watkins, Max Weber, Grant Wood and Andrew Wyeth.

Sculptors: Saul Baizerman, Alexander Calder, Jo Davidson, Jose De Creeft, Jose De Rivera, Herbert Ferber, John Flannagan, Chaim Gross, Minna Harkavy, Gaston Lachaise, Ibram Lassaw, Robert Laurent, Jacques Lipchitz, Seymour Lipton, Oronzio Maldarelli, Elie Nadelman, Isamu Noguchi, Bernard Reder, Hugo Robus, Thedore Roszak, and William Zorach.

During the exhibition, Mr. Alfred Barr, Trustee, Museum of Modern Art, New York, gave a two-hour lecture on American art from its origins to the present day, but his emphasis was on contemporary abstractionist, expressionist, and experimentalist techniques.

He showed slides of nearly 150 American paintings as well as special film extracts depicting the famous American mobile sculptor Alexander Calder at work and Jackson Pollock demonstrating the drip technique by which he painted his heroic abstract canvases.

*****