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THE NEW YORKER
May 7th, 1938

Of The three, the WPA show is perhaps the most immediately important, for it represents a kind of summing-up of the season's production in this section of the Project. Its interest is intensified by the current controversy over the pending Fine Arts Bill, whose fate in Congress will determine whether or not the Project or some similar form of Government subsidy of the arts is to become a permanent part of our social structure.

It seems to me almost beyond question that the bill's passage is necessary if the present vitality in American Art is to continue-a vitality due largely to WPA support through the depression. The exhibition is well worth seeing for its own sake, politics aside. Though it's not so attractive as the show of works by Chicago artists of the Project held a month or two ago, there are some excellent things on view. --- notably, I thought, Vincent Campanella's sharply light "Dark River" and Abraham Harriton's delicate "Sunnyside in Winter" --- and the general level of the work is so high in honesty and imaginativeness that I wonder how anyone can see it and want to put an end to such enterprise. I've always thought that as far as the Art Project is concerned, the Government is getting all the best of the bargain. If it holds, onto what it has, and manages it shrewdly, in a hundred years, it can hardly fail to have the most valuable collection of art in the world.

ROBERT M. COATES