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Brooklyn Art Depicts Immigration

By RICHARD F. SHEPARD

There is a central question that bedevils both the curator of an art exhibition and the administrator of an Immigration law: Who should be admitted and who should be left out? The title of the new exhibition that opens opens Tuesday at the Museum of the Borough of Brooklyn, "Tides of Immigration: Romantic Visions and Urban Realities," betokens a relationship in this instance between the policies of art and government.

Choices of admission and exclusion are a heavy, often depressing chore for immigration officials, who shape the lives of millions, as well as the makeup of the nation. They were less far-reaching and more felicitous, though no less perplexing, for Shelly Mehlman Dinhofer, director and curator of exhibitions at the museum,

"There are more than 90 pieces of art in this exhibition," Ms. Dinhofer said as the works were being mounted in the 1,000-sqaure-foot room that is the museum. It is on the second floor of Boylan Hall on the campus of Brooklyn College, Campus Road and Bedford Avenue in the borough's Midwood section, "I wanted an upbeat exhibition and I sought art that expressed the optimism that people brought with them to America as well as art that described what they found here. But it all is based on the quality of the art."

The museum, which is not related to the large Brooklyn Museum on Eastern Parkway, has filled its limited quarters with a treasure of art — paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture — that not only salutes the immigrant but also the City of New York, where so many immigrants remained after their ships docked. The show is a tribute to the Statue of Liberty included several watercolor studies of the statue by its builder, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi.
The painters and photographers represented here contribute to the top-drawer cachet of the show. They span nearly a century and a half in time and style. Among them are Milton Avery, George Wesley Bellows, Romare Bearden, Stuart Davis, Arthur Fellig (Weegee), William Glackens, William Gropper, Chaim Gross, George Grosz, Lewis W. Hine, Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, David Levine, Jack Levine, Jacob Riis, John Sloan, Raphael Soyer, Saul Steinberg, Joseph Stella, Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand

A 'Harbor' Entrance

The imaginative exhibition starts at the threshold, where John Stachowicz, the exhibition designer, has adapted a print from an 1889 Harper's Weekly illustration to be the entranceway. It is 20 feet by 9 feet and depicts the great bay of New York with the Statue of Liberty as its centerpiece, as viewed by the crowds at the Battery.

There is an order to the display inside. The visitor begins with early scenes: a view of Jasper Francis Cropsey's almost bucolic 1951 painting Castle Garden, N.Y.C.," depicting the elegant harbor adornment four years before it was enlisted as an immigrant station. As one moves along, the immigrants catch the eye, seen as individuals and as masses. One percieves the currents in the tide that caught the artistic eye.

For instance, George Henry Story's 1877 portrayal of an Italian organ grinder, "Street Musician," is a bright and sunny painting of a newcomer who has an inner serenity. Edward Hopper's early 20th-century "Polish Mother and Child" is more stark, a picture of a woman in determination and strength. William Groppers 1940 "Tailor" is a painting of a Jewish craftsman, eyes intent on the needlework involved in making a shirt.

There are portraits of Russians, Czeckslovaks, Italians. One may see vivid re-creations of the pushcart markets, photographs of the life under the Lower East Side elevated, drawings of the tenements and the parks and, always, the street — a sort of village square for the paesani, often from the same hamlet in Europe, to group together in New York. A recent bronze sculpture by Bruno Lucchesi almost does for the Lower East Side what Remington did for the Far West. His "Orchard Street," a foot and a half long, gives us a clothing merchant, yarmulke on his head, wares on the street, with a man trying on a coat and a woman doing the same off to the side.

Not everything is representational. Saul Steinberg's 1951 "Passport Photos" is an eloquently ironic concept: inked fingerprints pressed on apper, appearing as smudged faces atop bodies drawn below. Ms. Dinhofer is also proud of hte photo she found in the Municipal Archives. It was taken by M.L. Jacobs in 1937 and shows workers preparing Edward Laning's murals for the dining room on Ellis Island. Next to it is Laning's own study of the mural, "Passage to India, Building the Pacific Railroad," painted in 1935.

Looked for the Unusual

"I looked for works of art not readily available in New York institutions," Ms. Dinhofer said. "I looked for things in museum storerooms. I am a collector myself and the institutions from all over do lend us their objects. The museum has no collection of its own. We were founded in 1981 as our own institution. Brooklyn College gives us the space and pays the curator's salary. We are a thematically based museum, mostly themes of Brooklyn, where there is no end of artistic themes to draw on. We are not an elitist museum but believe it should be open and interesting to all people, not necessarily primarily those only interested in art."

The exhibition is open, free, through Dec. 2 from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Mondays through Thursdays (until 8 on Tuesdays), and from noon to 4 P.M. on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Information: (718) 780-5152.

Mrs. Dinhofer said the museum would move across campus in the spring to La Guardia Hall, where it will have three times the space it now has. The opening exhibition in April wiill be about baseball.

"It will be called 'The Grand Game of Baseball,'" said Ms. Dinhofer, who is nothing if not a Brooklyn booster. "'The Grand Game of Baseball and the Brooklyn Dodgers.' What happened to them after that doesn't really concern us."

[[image - painting]]
William Groppers painting "Tailor" is part of the exhibition "Tides of Immigration: Romantic Visions and Urban Realities" in Brooklyn.

N.Y. Times
10/5/86