Viewing page 126 of 166

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

6 Section 4 Art Nov. 25, 1962 New York Herald Tribune

Emily Genauer on Art
Happy Hunting In a Cornucopia

Most appropriately for the season, the art galleries and museums of New York this week simulated a great cornucopia overflowing with goodies. Faced with such bounty the critic can choose to write at length about two or three of the exhibitions, or, taking a cue from artists themselves, let the available material shape its handling. The second course, dictating no more than a quick look at the largesse, with perhaps a little taste of some of the items, may in this instance be the more useful.

The most spectacular new event by far I approach with some hesitation because it can be seen only by those able to manage the $50 admission fee. That is the showing, for the first time in its entirety and in its own magnificent quarters, of the art collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Lehman. For eight evenings (Nov. 27 through Nov. 30; Dec. 3 through Dec. 6) the newly redecorated five-story house at 7 W. 54th St. built originally by Mr. Lehman's father, Philip Lehman, and now untenanted except for its treasures, will be opened to benefit New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.

European Style

In it visitors will find the only American counterpart of some of the great palaces of Europe that have been transformed into museums (the Frick, remember, was originally designed as the museum it would one day become). It is fervently hoped - and, indeed, by many in the art world firmly believed - that eventually the Lehman house, located as it is in the midst of the new museum complex clustering around the museum of Modern Art, will also be opened permanently to the public, although no commitment of any sort has been made.

In the meantime the collection, sampled by the public in the seven years it was partially shown at the Metropolitan Museum, the Louvre's Orangerie, and the Cincinnati Museum, stands as one of the greatest, publicly or privately owned, in the world. It ranges from primitive Italian masterpieces (two by Duccio, ten by Giovanni di Paolo) to 20th-century French. (five first-class Vuillards). Such a collection can't, obviously, be "reviewed." I write about it because, as the climber said of Mt. Everest, "it is there." Fifty dollars is an enormous admission fee, but the cause is worth it, and, as I heard one guard remark the other day, to see 500 works at that price comes to 10 cents apiece - a bargain however you figure it.

[[side box]]
Saturday Tour

A gallery-goer's guide appears each Saturday in the Herald Tribune. It lists the week's new exhibitions, with brief critical notes on each, according to neighborhood, to enable gallery-hoppers to make their door-to-door journey with a minimum of time and steps.
[[end side box]]

Another major event of the week is the Museum of Modern Art's annual exhibition of works it has acquired (whether by purchase or gift) during the past year. Eighty-four items are included in this latest haul. They date from 1880 to 1962, and were done by 76 artists in 20 countries.

These annual inventories by the museum used to have special significance as a guide for collectors eager to buy what's valuable, stylish or even just promising. No more. Art interest is today so great, and the art world's r.p.m. rate is so fast that free-wheeling collectors are apt to be ahead of the museum in spotting the new. Also, the museum itself, in the words of its director of collections, Alfred H. Barr jr., freely admits its fallibility, adding "When it acquires a dozen recent paintings it will be lucky if in 10 years, three will still seem worth looking at, if in 20 years only one should survive."

The trouble rises when modest mien is accompanied by great even if involuntary authority. The museum's power as a taste-maker is admittedly less than it used to be. One reason is that its own dynamic role has engendered enormous interest over the years and helped develop an art public with a mind of its own. A second is that its program has been erratic enough to disenchant some of that public. A third might be that today's level of esthetic production doesn't warrant much confidence.

The present show includes everything from gold nuggets (by Cezanne, Braque, Mattise) to plastic hamburgers (by Oldenberg, whose "popart" construction entitled "Dual Hamburgers" rather looks like - it's red-paint ketchup - a grinning, bleeding mouth). Categories don't mean anything, though. Another of the pop-artists or "new realists," Marisol, is represented by a painted wood construction called "The Family" which is very fine. In essence, and even by chance, in certain physical details, it's closely related to a social realist Ben Shahn, gouache ("French Workers") among the recent acquisitions that was painted twenty years ago - only Marisol is better.

Moses Soyer's Girls

The museum, riding its long-time favorite hobby-horse, dada, under a new name, bought heavily from its last year's exhibition "The Art of Assemblage." The pieces presently on view suggest this may be the final spur sending that horse to its death.

In any case, the show is big, and as lively as a Modern Museum presentation always is, however debatable its quality.

Reflection on the museum's purchase policy and Mr. Barr's footnote to it, leads easily to another new exhibition of the week, of work by an artist who has never been a museum favorite, Moses Soyer. Soyer, showing his most recent works at the A.C.A. Gallery, is admittedly - no, proudly - a traditionalist. He paints today, as he has always done, sad-faced girls, young dancers resting, seated or reclining nudes. In them are melancholy, physical fragility, strength of character, intimacy. Rembrandt and Degas may be said to be his ancestors.

[[a picture of an art piece is shown, with the following caption: "Marisol's "The Family," a wood sculpture, is among the recent acquisitions being shown at the Museum of Modern Art."]]

[[side box]]
Art Notes

The large turnout for Joseph H. Hirshhorn's Modern Sculpture Collection at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has prompted museum officials to extend the exhibit by two weeks to Jan. 20.

* * *

A selection of paintings from the National Kindergarten Association's 50th anniversary collection of work done by kindergarten children across the country will go on exhibit at the Standpoint Gallery, 30 W. 12th St., on Wednesday, Dec. 5. Pictures will be priced, mounted, from $5 to $15.

* * *

The ground-breaking ceremonies for the building addition planned for the Museum of Modern Art will be carried in a special news broadcast on WCBS-TV [[page torn]] at 4:45 p.m. on Channel [[page torn]]
[[end of side box]]

But now something quite wonderful has happened. Suddenly, the Soyer brush is handled with a new vibrancy. It flashes across the picture surface, no longer caressing form, as it used to, but igniting it. The light that used to give off a quiet glow now quivers and sparkles with brilliance (see the picture called "Apprehension 2"). But this is no mere technical transformation. The figures now are revealed in new dimension. They transcend the transient, take on grandeur and universality.

The question that comes to mind is this. Would the Modern Museum's survival percentage have been higher if it had less avidly indorsed novelty, and more often given support to slowly maturing traditionalists like Moses Soyer? The museum might answer this with a question of its own. Would an artist as traditional as Soyer, have been driven to self-examination and experiment if he weren't at once exasperated and involuntarily affected by the atmosphere of change provoked by the museum's policy?

One of the artists the Museum has supported with enthusiasm, Jean Dubuffet, is also currently being given a one-man exhibition, at the [[page torn]] [[and?]] Ekstrom Gallery.

In the big show the museum hung of his work last February, the most recent canvases by this artist noted for the grotesqueness of his abstract-expressionist conceptions and the brutishness of his technique, confounded his admirers by a new textural opulence and by a new development of and reliance on composition and focus.

His Old Self

Apparently his early supporters' uneasiness and the delighted surprise of diehards like me scared him off the new style. Dubuffet is "himself" again, as grotesque and deliberately crude as ever. His shapes - men, automobiles, houses - look like lumps of dough after they've been under the rolling pin. The paint darts and squiggles all over the surface, the brushwork superimposed with black linear pattern. Texture has a furry look, palette a sharp phosphorescence. The canvases in the show dating from last year (like "Rue Turlupet") bring to the exhibit enough compositional strength to remind one what Dubuffet can do. The latest ones tell us what he wants to do but not why.

[[side box]]
To Decem[[page torn]]
The Pain[[page torn]]
Histo [[page torn]]
My[[page torn]]
[[end side box]]