Argentine Art

In Richmond's conservative Commonwealth Club 200 Virginians and their guests last week gathered to dine on terrapin stew, beaten biscuits, Smithfield ham and orange ice, toast Argentina and the U. S. in brimming glasses of champagne. Cause of these happy doings: a preview that night at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts of the largest show of Argentine art ever put on outside South America. Said Argentine Ambassador Felipe A. Espil: "A country's artistic creations are the best exponents of its psychology and temperament." Eighty-year-old Counselor Robert Walton Moore of the U. S. Department of State agreed, but as a gallant Virginian made one exception: "Whenever I see Madame Espil I realize that, much as I love art, I love nature more."

Show's originator was Richmond's suave, scholarly Alexander Wilbourne Weddell, U. S. Ambassador to Argentina until he was switched to Spain last spring. Its organizer was shrewd, affable Director Thomas C. Colt Jr. of the Virginia Museum. Its able abettor was the State Department's new (1938) Division of Cultural Relations, formed to combat fascist penetration of Latin America, economic and intellectual, by organizing a Pan-American export trade in ideas. First of a series that may eventually include every nation south of the Rio Grande, the Argentine exhibition will tour the U. S. from coast to coast after it leaves Richmond next month.

Critics -- among 1,000 people who passed down the receiving line at the Virginia Museum to look at the show, chat with each other and pile up punch glasses at the base of the statues--agreed that artistically the choice of Argentina to start the Pan-American series of exhibitions had been sound. Like U. S. art, that of the Argentine has a strong flavor of the melting pot, has lately been turning from European influences to its native resources. Many of the 236 paintings, prints, water colors and pieces of sculpture in the show were inspired by the Ecole de Paris, from staid academic works to surrealism. Others were indigenous. Noteworthy:

> Francisco Vidal's classic Nude (see cut, p. 55) with draperies, a firmly modeled figure against a glowing Argentine landscape.

> Adolfo Montero's Chiriguano Indians, four chocolate-brown women bathing in a pool overhung by deep green palm trees.

> Alfredo Guide's Stevedores at Rest, three dark, serene Latins reclining on a pier, spaciously suggesting manana.

> Alfredo Gramajo Gutierrez's Election Day in the North of Argentina, a colorful crowd of sombreroed men voting, drinking, eating, playing mandolins, smoking and electioneering, painted with an eye for detail that recalled the jampacked canvases of Pieter Breughel.

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