Midseason

In the reflective aftermath of New Year's Day, Manhattan's myriad art galleries last week mustered the season's most varied array of fine arts. Just for perspective, the great Metropolitan Museum invited visitors back 2,000 years with a bimillennium exhibition of hard-bitten Roman portrait sculpture and charming Roman craftsmanship of the Age of Augustus (63 B.C.-14 A.D.). The Walker Galleries showed affectionately executed portraits by Durr Freedley, a quiet semiprofessional in the precise New England line, who died last year at Lexington, Mass. Most spirited post-Picasso lyricism of the season appeared at the Julien Levy Gallery in canvases by softspoken, curly-locked Abraham Rattner, who has lived in Paris since the War. A new C. I. O. sculptors' union exhibited honest work, good & bad, at the New School for Social Research. But best bets for seekers of reposeful pleasure were two showings by older U. S. artists whose work kept pace with their reputations.

> Exhibited at the Downtown Gallery was Making Music by Bernard Karfiol: two boys playing an accordion and a guitar in the luminous corner of an old, low, New England room with Colonial Primitive portraits on the wall behind them. Notable was the skill with which the painter made his own music of warm colors, cool light, suspended pattern.

> Uptown at the Rehn Galleries was a show of large, firmly painted water colors by Charles Burchfield, in which that famous first of the "U. S. Scene" artists proved his widening scope. When Burchfield began to paint in upstate New York, he loved and satirized the blackening monuments of "General Grant Gothic" architecture in U. S. houses and streets. In his later work, satire is supplanted by more profound emotion. Most dramatic if not the finest example: December Twilight: a cold, desolate village against a furnace slit of sunset.

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