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Red Plot Laid to Artists' Equity As 'Using' Party Line in Museums

By C.P. TRUSSELL
Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES

[[2 Columns]]

WASHINGTON, March 17 - Artists' Equity Association, an organization that figures largely in sponsoring and judging exhibitions in museums throughout the country, was denounced today as "the latest link" in a chain of Moscow-inspired conspiracy to communize.

The charges were made by Representative George A. Dondero Republican of Michigan, who said they had been built into "a clear picture" by data and protests from artists in all parts of the United States.

Mr. Dondero contended that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, the Virginia Museum at Richmond, and many others had been "used" to present American art as Moscow would like it to be.

Paintings and sculpture done by members of Artists' Equity Association and awarded top prizes by fellow members serving as judges, Mr. Dondero told the House, showed the American artist as expressing himself through distortion, frustration, and a spirit of rebellion. This, he said, made good Soviet propaganda and helped to depreciate American art.

UNESCO Move Charged

Mr. Dondero charged that "this left-wing artists' organization" was ready to dominate the Visual Arts Panel of the American Committee of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization that meets next September.

Six of the American committee's eighteen panel members, he said, were connected with Artists' Equity: Hudson D. Walker, Equity director; Russell M. Cowles, Stanley Hayter, Abraham Rattner, William Zorach, and Theodore Brensen, the latter chairman of the Equity's committee on cultural relations.

"Artists' Equity Association," Representative Dondero told the House, "has passed the first requirement of a Communist-front. It has Red organizers, left sympathizers, and just enough innocents to meet the requirement."

Mr. Dondero cited scores of persons prominent in the organization of the Artists' Equity and groups that preceded it, tying them into the previous movements and identifying them with organizations that the Department of Justice or the House Committee on Un-American Activities had found to be either outright Communist or Communist-front groups.

Mr. Dondero noted that Henry Billings, president of Artists' Equity had been made a member of the UNESCO advisory committee. Mr. Billings, he said, had been of the initiators of the American Artists' Congress, a "Red" organization. 

"In 1942 Billings," he declared, "with the aid of Archibald MacLeish, former Librarian of Congress, was instrumental in forcing the Reds into Artists for Victory," a wartime organization that Mr. Dondero identified as "leftists, too." 

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The "chain" of organizations which, Mr Dondero held, led into the present Artists' Equity was a long one. his was a story of devious forming of organizations with patriotic names and or one becoming "list" as another took its place. 

"No immunity should be granted to the Red art termites," Mr. Dondero shouted to the House. "The loyal American artists *** are determined to protect our cultural birthright from this horde of art saboteurs who would first destroy in order to control. 

"The loyal artists must insist that art juries be freed from domination of the leftists. They must see that the American Panel on Visual Art of UNESCO include no radical such as William Zerach, member of the Communist John Reed Club, [formed, Mr Dondero said, as the first unit of the Moscow art chain] and Henry Billings *** to misrepresent the art and artist of our Republic." 

Economic Unit, Says Equity

The Artists' Equity Association is a "nonpolitical, non esthetic group organized for the economic group organized for the economic benefit of its members," Lincoln Rothschild, its executive director said here yesterday. He said by "non esthetic" he means that it did not favor any particular style or phase of art but embraced all forms. 

"We take absolutely no position politically or esthetically," he reiterated. "Of course we don't control any judges, in fact our national group does not back exhibits."

Mr Rothschild called Representative Dondero's charges "old, unproved generalities." 

Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said: 

"Mr. Dondero has said that before. I have absolutely no comment to make on it,"

No representative of the Museum of Modern Art was immediately available for comment. 

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