Painters on Parade

Up the broad Italian staircase of Chicago's big Art Institute one day last week tramped 5,964 hot, jostling visitors. Awaiting them on the second floor were a new $4,500 fan which was not working and a first view of the 863 pictures which comprise the second Century of Progress Art Show. Three out of every five pictures were new to the exhibit. But where the 1933 show, as a record of U. S. collecting, was topheavy with French works, this year's exhibit put U. S. painters to the fore, furnishing spectators with a brisk parade of native artists from Copley to Marsh.

Lady Frances Wentworth revealed the calm realism of John Singleton Copley (1737-1815), an apt painter of the gentlefolk whose silks and satins rustled primly through the streets of pre-Revolutionary Boston. His Brass Crosby was technically more assured, exemplified his work as an official painter of important London figures. Not hanging was his famed portrait of the Knatchbull family which took seven years to finish because Mr. Knatchbull caused repeated repaintings by remarrying, begetting more and more children. American-born Benjamin West (1738-1820) who lived in London and was one of his generation's most famed painters and teachers, was represented by Death on a Pale Horse, lent by the Pennsylvania Museum.

Recognized immediately by every visitor was a Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) Washington showing the President's sunken cheeks caused by the wooden false teeth which Painter Charles Willson Peale made for him. Less known was a Washington at the Battle of Trenton by Stuart's contemporary, John Trumbull (1756-1843), moody son of a Connecticut Governor, who once refused a commission in Washington's army because a clerk misdated it. Best known of Painter Trumbull's works are his four big panels (The Declaration of Independence, The Surrender of Burgoyne, The Surrender of Cornwallis, The Resignation of General Washington) in the rotunda of the U. S. Capitol for which the Government paid him the generous sum of $32,000. Most striking in the gallery of early Americans was a dynamic Head of Lafayette by Inventor-Painter Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872).

In one American room Catskill Mountains and The Storm by George Inness (1825-1894) were two strong examples of his Corotesque landscapes. An inheritor of the Hudson River School of painters, Swedenborgian Inness received little praise until after his death when critics hailed him a "master of U. S. landscapists." It was otherwise with Winslow Homer (1836-1910) who was acclaimed when he was 19 for a series of lithograph portraits of the Massachusetts Senate. His water colors fill an entire room of the Chicago show. There was many a Homer rendering of the thunderous waters of the Maine coast as well as a group of brilliant, placid Bahaman seascapes, faintly reminiscent of one of his most famed works The Gulf Stream, which hangs permanently at the Art Institute.

The two most arresting pictures in the American galleries were by two of the most famed recent U. S. artists. Thomas Eakins' (1844-1916) The Agnew Clinic showed students and visiting doctors watching the University of Pennsylvania's late great Dr. David Hayes Agnew and assistants performing an operation--a picture sometimes compared to Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson. Four grim-faced surgeons in blood-stained white and bare hands, one solemn nurse, are grouped near an anesthetized patient.

George Wesley Bellows' (1882-1925) awesome Edith Cavell (lent by his widow) shows the British War nurse walking with restrained exaltation to her execution. Bellows' lusty, romantic interest in sports was recalled by his famed Dempsey and Firpo.

Like Winslow Homer, Whistler had a room to himself which included his famed The White Girl (Joanna Hefferen, Whistler's Parisian model & mistress). Gone, however, for this year was his Portrait of the Artist's Mother. John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and Mary Cassatt (1855-1926) the Impressionist spinster painter of mothers and children, each had six canvases, none of them of notable fame. Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) was represented by four romantically sombre works. Cornelius Bliss lent Arthur B. Davies' (1862-1928) Sleep which gained fame by being refused by London's Tate Gallery. Two galleries were given over to products of Chicago artists, among them a brown chalk drawing by Maude Hutchins, wife of the University of Chicago's president. There was full representation of such contemporary palettes as Burchfield, Hopper, Sheeler, Poole, Karfiol, Brook, Benton, Dove, Kantor, Mangravite, Sample, Sterne, O'Keeffe, Kroll, Kuniyoshi, Speicher, Curry, Lucioni, etc. John Steuart Curry's Tornado hung between two Jo Davidson busts, one of Clarence Darrow, the other of Franklin D. Roosevelt, arranged thus a month ago in all innocence by Director Robert Bartholow Harshe. Last year Grant Wood's American Gothic caused a storm of comment but this year his Daughters of Revolution, three prim, pince-nezed, self-important matrons backgrounded by Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, scored even more.

But this year's Century of Progress show was by no means All-American. There are ten Goyas (including the six Institute-owned Episodes in the Capture of the Bandit Margato and Andrew Mellon's Sabasa Garcia), eight El Grecos, including the Chicago Institute's Assumption of the Virgin. The Italians range from Spinello Aretino to Tiepolo. William Randolph Hearst sent a Gothic tapestry from San Simeon while Edsel Ford, no lender last year, lent a Matisse, a Benozzo Gozzoli, two Fra Angelicos. From Leningrad's Hermitage came Terborch's Music Lesson. Watteau's subtle Le Mezzetin was once owned by Russia's art-loving Catherine the Great. A high spot was a Nativity attributed to Albrecht Altdorfer. All of Painting's great names were there: Rembrandt, Hals, Rubens, Van Dyck, Botticelli, Raphael, Botticini, Tintoretto, Veronese, Raeburn, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Constable, Romney, Boucher, Corot, Courbet, Daumier, Delacroix, Ingres, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Manet. Redon, Cezanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Utrillo, Braque, Picasso.

Like last year's Century of Progress show, this year's was the best current exhibition anywhere in the world. Officials last week were busy checking attendance figures, wondering if they would break last year's record of 1,600,000 visitors.

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