Solid Abstractions

Carpenters, painters, plasterers were making an unholy din in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week. With deeply furrowed brow, Director Alfred H. Barr Jr. had retired to his office and was scowling at an unproductive typewriter. Scattered about the floors were strange objects of wood, rusted iron, marble, plate glass, polished brass. All of them were heavy and a great many of them were extremely large. With 150 paintings, they made up the largest exhibition of abstract art New York has yet seen.

At the crucial instant the U. S. Government gave the exhibition some needful publicity when New York customs officials refused to accept 19 strange objects as nondutiable sculpture. They based their ruling on a judicial decision which states that sculpture as an art must depict "natural objects in their true proportion." Things were at an impasse since the avowed purpose of all abstract sculpture was to depict nothing at all but to stand on its own merits as pure design. President Conger Goodyear of the Modern Museum promptly protested.

'The issue," said President Goodyear,

"is whether the Government is to determine by law what is art. In this instance there is no question as to the moral character of the objects under consideration. They are denied admission on the sole ground that they do not completely meet . . . court decisions for works of art." Finally the Government allowed the sculptural abstractions to enter the country under bond.

Meanwhile at the Museum Director Barr gulped coffee and puffed cigarets, as he tried to explain why two wooden balls dangling on wires from a bit of bent pipe should be considered art. Three days before the exhibition opened printers were waiting anxiously for the catalog of which Director Barr had composed only six pages. Excerpt :

"Resemblance to natural objects, while it does not necessarily destroy these esthetic values, may easily adulterate their purity. Therefore since resemblance to nature is at best superfluous and at worst distracting, it might as well be eliminated."

From room to room Director Barr has arranged his exhibits to trace the development of abstract art from the Cubists, who formalized what was still representational art, to the latest Constructivists whose esthetic thrills come from the mere sight of wheels within wheels.

Some of the things that Director Barr found most difficult to explain :

P: An object like an elongated plum, to the end of which is attached an iron crown.

P: A tube of thick rusted iron, to which is applied half a meat ball, a fish horn and several spikes, all of the same material.

P: An oval disk of half-polished marble bearing several small bumps and a deep groove.

Laymen found it easiest to grasp the work of such semi-abstractionists as Italian Sculptor Umberto Boccieni, who in 1913 paraphrased the Louvre's famed Winged Victory with a statue of a striding form in which the muscles are whipped out into streamlined forms. Its title: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (see cut).

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