1,214 Items

When spade & shovel were deep in the dumps of Flushing Meadows, there were still no plans for exhibiting U. S. art at the New York World's Fair. Alarmed artists' associations all over the country started pounding at Grover Whalen. Eventually Mr. Whalen announced that, under the chairmanship of A. Conger Goodyear, president of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, the Fair would put on a big contemporary U. S. art show.

Opening punctually, as many an earlier planned exhibit did not, American Art Today turned out to be the biggest show of its kind ever put on. From some 25,000 entries, judges chose 1,214 examples of painting, sculpture and the graphic arts. The roster of well-known names--Thomas Hart Benton, Eugene Speicher, Adolf Dehn, George Grosz, Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, William Zorach, Peggy Bacon, many another--is long, but incomplete. Some (Georgia O'Keefe, Jose de Creeit) did not submit anything. Some (Frederick Waugh, Robert Brackman) were turned down.

Yet the World's Fair tripper, taking art on the run, could hardly ask for anything more panoramic. Ranging from tame portraits of young girls to woozy, crawling abstractions, from genteel sculptures in baby-blue plaster to great blocks of stone, from Christmas-cardy woodcuts to elusive black-and-whites, the show represents all trends, tastes, techniques. A few exhibits, with their wavering lines, naive perspectives, jumbled colors, may invite perplexed comparison with little Hilda's fourth-grade drawings. But there is not enough surrealism to bite beholders. Many things in the exhibition treat in some way of the American scene.

The show gives evidence of enormous energy among U. S. artists. Less evident is their collective importance. Seldom old-fogy, often bold, they are oftener members of a school, children of an era, than unmistakable individuals. Attesting the show's variety are such pictures as Benton's quiet, lonesome Conversation; Doris Lee's whimsical, clever Holiday (see cut); Joe Hirsch's Two Men (see cut) which, using a very broad, low canvas, catches breadthwise the gaunt intensity of two workers; Jack Levine's Rouault-like Night Scene, where the ruddy heads and hands of the two figures emerge from a blue-black murk like blazing coals.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.