Social Scene

Polite rivalry exists between the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in Manhattan. Two months ago the Museum of Modern Art called the attention of Manhattan esthetes to an almost forgotten genre painter named George Caleb Bingham, who was Missouri's favorite 70 years ago. Last week the Whitney Museum went its rival one better by filling three floors with other genre paintings by Bingham, his predecessors, contemporaries and followers in one of the most interesting exhibitions of the year, entitled "The Social Scene in Paintings & Prints from 1800-1935."

Genre painting means a style or subject matter dealing realistically with scenes of everyday life. That was all the 171 exhibits in the Whitney Museum had in common. Emotionally pictures varied from the sentimental Girl and Pets, by the mid-Victorian Eastman Johnson, to a blunt garish study of U. S. sailors tousling trollops on a park bench, painted in 1933 by Paul Cadmus (TIME, April 30; May 28). The New York American's venerable Critic Malcolm Vaughan was so pleased by all he saw that he wrote:

"Of all the exhibitions ever held at the museum, this one is the friendliest, the most immediately engaging. ... It constitutes an historical occasion; but even its historical value is secondary to its worth as an art show that entertains."

The Museum's second floor was devoted to modern pictures by such standbys as Marsh, Curry, Benton, Biddle, Hopper, Burchfield, Sloan, et al. More interesting were the 19th Century paintings that filled the ground floor--sentimental middle-class canvases by comfortable middle-class artists entirely unaware of breadlines, the plight of the masses, the villainy of capitalists or any of the other things that excited the brushes of their successors upstairs.

Typical of the whole show was On Shipboard by Henry Bacon (see cut), showing a group of hardy passengers on a liner of the swinging lamp era trying to forget their interior troubles. Artist Bacon was an excellent draughtsman with an instinctive sense of composition but beyond that his artistic mind did not rise. Yet in the ingenuous 1870's his name meant much in the art world. Wounded in the Civil War, he went to Paris to recuperate and study art, spending most of his life thereafter in Europe. A pupil of the painstaking Jean Leon Gerome, Alexandre Cabanel and Edouard Frere, he became one of the most persistent of salon exhibitors. Between 1868 and 1895 Henry Bacon's name appears 25 times on the Beaux Arts lists, his canvases always being hung "on the line." Two of his pictures which became best sellers as steel engravings: The Boston Boys & General Gage, Little Bopeep.

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), a great U. S. artist even today, was represented by six canvases in the Whitney show. Best of the lot was his picture of the Biglen brothers, famed oarsmen of the 1870's, pulling their double shell around a mark in a race. Eakins' particular passion was having his models pose in exactly the same attitude from day to day. He used to make them stand against a background marked out with squared lines with colored ribbons attached at the exact point where head, elbow, knee, etc. were supposed to be. Prizefights were his passion. In 1886 he shocked all Philadelphia and got himself fired as instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy when he asked a young lady art student to take off her clothes and substitute for a professional model who failed to turn up.

The late great Winslow Homer of Boston is represented by ten pictures. First-rate art was his fine painting of two ladies in hoop skirts playing croquet on a shaded lawn. One of the most prolific of artists, Homer sent back drawings from the front during the Civil War which made the reputation of Harper's Weekly. Every schoolboy knows him today for his vivid canvas, The Gulf Stream, in which a giant Negro is sprawled on the deck of a mastless catboat while sharks circle the derelict. Suave Socialite Edwin Austin Abbey used to have almost as much trouble with his models as Eakins. One of the most popular illustrators in the U. S., he was paid $200 and $300 apiece for his drawings by Harper's Weekly, but spent almost as much as that on each one for authentic costumes, weapons, armor, furniture, etc. for his models to pose in. The Abbey collection of costumes is now one of the most important treasures of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

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