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Vernissage

Whitney-Modern

After reporting, hailing, deploring and rectifying the successive announcements over the last three years of the Whitney Museum's proposed merger with the Metropolitan and the subsequent separation before the union was ever consummated, it seemed almost like a fiancée who set out for Reno before she got to the altar. The new announcement by the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art that the latter has transferred an adjoining plot of ground where the Whitney will erect a permanent building, while this in no way is to affect the independence of either institution, sounds more like a common-law marriage than a King James Version one.

Whatever the ultimate destiny of these two institutions may be as neighbors - and any guesswork at this early stage is too loose to make sense - several current facts stand out. Obviously the Whitney's present home of several remodeled old buildings form an inadequate, not even fireproof plant. Hence the Whitney must move or rebuild. Inconvenient as it may be to Greenwich Villagers, they will join in recognizing that the population and transportation center of New York is nearer, if not actually at, the announced new location. And neighborliness may induce at least implicit co-operation between the two institutions with which living American artists are most concerned. How beneficial to both artists and public that neighborliness turns of to be depends on a precise mutual balance between good will, taste, courage and efficiency henceforth. 

Abstract red herring

Of all the places in the world to fight Communism, art, it seems to us, looks like hardly the most important one. Even that staunch poster-designer and part-time propagandist Pablo Picasso is nowadays being called "politically unreliable" (what a nostalgic Nazi ring that phrase has) by his comrades of the French Communist Party. Too individual, that's what he is- and that's what most artists are- to survive under and Communist totalitarianism, no matter what infantile dreams a few of them may have about an ideal human society at this safe, Henry Wallace- distance from the aesthetic dictatorship of the Kremlin.

Yet it is on this tenuous ground that one member of Congress, Representative G. A. Dondero of Michigan, has recently been attacking (and, if not for his legislative immunity, libeling) en bloc a good part of the artists of the country. Recently he extended his range from the Artists Equity Association- which he has inferentially attacked be denouncing or smearing a perhaps vulnerable handful of its some fourteen hundred members - to the critics of eight New York publications (four of them newspapers which supported Dewey in the last election). ARTnews is included in this general rather than selectively distinguished group which Mr. Dondero accuses of being "very kindly" in its critical attitude toward "left-wing, so-called artists."

Now, if ARTnews has been excessively kindly to and "so-called" artist, we regret our generosity very much indeed- even if he belongs to the Sons of the American Revolution just as much as if he belongs to Mr. Browder's private Politburo. As to "left-wing" artists as such, without distinction in quality, we can't see political coloration entering into criticism except where it is manifest in the object of art- in other words, where the propagandistic or ideological content of that object transforms it from and artistic end in itself into a political vehicle. Otherwise it is ludicrous and dishonest to ask of a critic that he not only describe the political thinking or affiliation of a painter of non-political pictures, but that the criticism be more or less "kindly" as a result. Mr. Dondero also seems to forget that nowaday it is expensively libelous for anybody except a Congressman to call somebody else a Communist in public without proof. His astonishment voice before the House of Representatives on May 17 that "art critics seem to enjoy complete freedom from directional supervision" shows a certain yearning for the iron totalitarian rule of critical opinion that flourishes on Pravda and the rest of the Soviet press.

It is interesting to note that, as Mr. Dondero shapes up in the full round, his desire to muzzle the free press coincides with the Moscow line against modern art. For, in the last analysis, that is what his attacks are all aimed at- the art detested by the fossils of a "so-called artists" professional league whose vice-president boasts in print of his connection with Mr. Dondero. These rather vicious old boys happen, however, to paint approximately in the only academic style which the Soviet Government allows. And the modern art which Mr. Dondero called Communist would have as little chance in Russia as its painters to escape Serbia- notwithstanding an occasional harebrained or sentimental one among them who campaigned for Wallace or once belonged to the Artists' Union. Even if some still hold those "left-wing" ideas, what they paint proves they are "politically unreliable"- and we believe they are due for a rude awakening sooner or later.

Only a great, generous, muddling democracy like ours could afford the simultaneous paradox of a Congressman who tries to attack Communism by demanding the very rules which Communists enforce where they are in power, and of a handful of artists who enroll idealistically in movements sympathetic to Soviet Russia while they go on painting pictures that would land them in jail under a Communist government. Some speeches in Congress aren't very good, but then some pictures aren't very good either, and often we fear that a lot of the published criticism doesn't make very interesting reading. But, as the old line goes, we would defend to death the right of every citizen to go on doing the same thing, no matter what union, league, party or paper he belongs to, so long as he doesn't break the law.

Postscript to amateurs

Response to ARTnews National Amateur Painters Competition- which was announced in the previous issue- has been neither slow nor sparse. Within only a few weeks there have been far more than the expected number to declare their intention to enter- and well over any proof that might have been asked of the need and timeliness of the idea. We are already seeking to make arrangements for handling more than the presently specified limit of 4,000 actual entries. Meanwhile, however, we can only urge prospective entrants to file their Entry Blanks early.

Further details of the Competition appear in the announcement (p. 57) and under "Competitions, Scholarships" (p. 69). Also in this issue we inaugurate "Amateur Standing" (p. 10)- a monthly page for the non-professional artist. Beside promising future reports as lively and valuable as Miss Kingsbury's from Ithaca, this department is intended to answer questions of general interest to amateurs, which we invite them to send in. A.M.F.

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