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Art Digest
Jan. 1. 1939

Magazine of Art. Washington
Jan. 1939

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View of the Sculpture Exhibit, Washington Museum of Modern Art

Washington Sees Important Modern Sculpture

An Elaborate sculpture exhibition of modern American and European work is on view this month at the Museum of Modern Art Gallery of Washington. More than 50 pieces installed by Charles M. Goodman, architect of the Procurement Division of the Treasury, present a cross section of representative work.
Featuring the exhibition by its size and prominent placing is the 7 1/2 foot bronze Justice which Romauld Kraus did under a Treasury Department Art Project competition for the Federal Courthouse in Newark. The statue was rejected when a storm of protest was raised in the Newark newspapers. The figure, sans scales and blindfold, with arms upraised, seemed "communistic" to Judge Guy L. Fake, while others raised a cry against the semi-nude's heavy biceps and general appearance of strength (THE ART DIGEST, Dec. 15, 1935).
The Modern Museum officials searched out the homeless statue from the Treasury Department's attic; and it will be interesting to see if public opinion has changed over this work which is highly praised by many professional critics in the arts. Kraus, an Austrian-born artist, won his commission from the Treasury Department while he was on the W. P. A.
Mr. Kraus, at the time of the furore in Newark was dumbfounded that his statue be called communistic. "It seems to me to be more of a Christian idea than a communistic idea," he said in the New York Sun. "That is the way I intended it. The judge does not seem to like it because it is not blindfolded, with scales and sword as is the traditional figure of justice. The woman represents love of humanity, the great mother principle which has been the guiding force of civilization. She is not blindfolded. To me justice is clear-eyed."
Among the Americans included are many of the best known contemporary artists, and some who are little known. In the latter group is L. Carroll Barnes, a young North Carolina boy whose Paul Bunyan, carved from a cherry log he found in the Smoky Mountains, shows an individual, mature talent.
The late Gaston Lachaise is represented by a Standing Figure, a small bronze full of the concentrated dynamism that Lachaise imparted to his studies of female maturity. "To a nation predominantly adolescent," writes Hazel Grant Edgar of this American sculptor, "his insistence upon the mature was frightening."
Robert Laurent, French-born American, is represented by the Whitney Museum's Kneeling Figure and two other works. Henry Kreis loans his brownstone Indian Summer. Among the other exhibits are a serpentine Polynesian Head by Boris Lovel-Lorski, Flight of Night by Manship, Kneeling Figure by Helene Sardeau, the humorous Sailors' Music by Louis Slobodkin, and Maurice Sterne's Head of a Bomb Thrower.
The list of American artists provides the bulk of the entries. Among them are Archipenko, Saul Baizerman, Ben-Shumel, Cornelia Van A. Chapin, Jo Davidson, Hunt Diederich, Richard Davis, Alice Decker, Herbert Ferber, Waylande Gregory, Chaim Gross, Minna Harkevy, Herbert Haseltine, Nathaniel Kaz, Nakian, Noguchi, Hugo Robus, Concetta Scaravaglione, Lucile Swan, Heinze Warneke, Polygnotos Vagis, Marion Walton, T. Trajan, William Zorach, Wheeler Williams, Anita Weschler, and Jose de Creeft.

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