Advertising Art

Uniformed soldiers, tanks and bombers, rather than toothsome girlish smiles, will sell this year's quota of cigarets and soup to the U.S. public. Last week the most important barometer of U.S. advertising art indicated that the long reign of the pretty girl, the adman's most unfailing little helper, was temporarily on the decline. That barometer was the annual exhibition of the Art Directors Club of New York, year's biggest event in advertising art.

For the first time in its 22-year-history, the Art Directors Club this time crashed the gates of the holiest sanctum of the U.S. art world, Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, proudly hung its 301 hand-picked covers and ads near the museum's austere obelisks and mummies. Trends:

> The girl ad, which had lost both dignity and raiment in its evolution from the patrician '205 to the leggy '403 (see cut), shows a sharp decline in popularity. > Color photography, once thought to spell the doom of hand-painted illustration, runs neck & neck with its rival. >The humorous cartoon ad ("Quick. Henry, the Flit!", etc.), which reached a peak in the middle '303, is on the way down.

> Use of paintings by well-known artists, a trend popularized by Dole Pineapple and De Beers diamonds, is running stronger than ever.

But the biggest trend of all is toward patriotism and sobriety. Big industrial advertisers, having nothing to sell, specialized in dignified institutional ads.

Belgium's Finest

In the 15th Century, under the lavish rule of the Dukes of Burgundy, the rich bilingual country of Belgium (then known as Flanders) held, for a short time, the cultural leadership of the Western world. Flemish painters and musicians ranged over Europe with the pomp of diplomats, asked high prices from competing princes and even taught a lesson or two to the artists of the budding Italian Renaissance. Today the finest mementos of Flanders' peak century are the small paintings, done with the detail of miniatures that are known to museums and collectors as "Flemish primitives."

The exiled Government of conquered Belgium put on last week, in Manhattan, one of the most important exhibitions of Flemish primitives the U.S. has ever seen. Most notable items were seven top-notch paintings which had been smuggled out of Europe via South America and the Far East, and had never before been seen in the U.S. Painted with almost microscopic care, their colors as mellow and clear as the tone of an old violin, these pictures resembled the work of modern "primitive" artists (TIME, Feb. 9) only in the prim simplicity and occasional unconscious humor of their subject matter.

Stiffly formal and preponderantly religious, they showed demure madonnas suckling solemn-faced infants, martyrs suffering horrible tortures with quiet dignity, earnest, humorless burghers and princes and their doll-faced wives. Single exception to the prevailing solemnity was a grimly humorous allegory by Painter Hieronymus Bosch (see cut), showing with peasant grotesqueness and a premonition of surrealism the hag-ridden death of an irresolute miser.

Descending in direct line from the monkish French Gothic manuscript illu - minators of the late Middle Ages, the Flemish school got its start in the early 14003 when Jan van Eyck, painter and "varlet de chambre" to the Duke of Burgundy, brought a brand-new vividness and brilliancy to the technique of painting.

Van Eyck and his northern followers painted not the imaginary, ideal world of Biblical legend, but the matter-of-fact scenes that they saw about them, picturing in almost superphotographic detail the chill landscapes, household furnishings, costumes and sharp-featured faces of their native Flanders.

In the end the more exuberant fashions of the Italian Renaissance swept their homely, literal art from popularity. But before it had done so, Van Eyck and his immediate successors, Roger van der Weyden, Dirk Bouts, Hans Memling and Ger ard David, had made their mark on history as the first realists in European art.

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