Judgment Day for Judges

Like a platoon of daring turtles, U.S. art critics stuck their necks way out last week. The extrusion occurred in Cincinnati, where Art Museum Director Walter Siple had the bright idea of showing the "Critics' Choice" in contemporary U.S. art. Result: from 57 of the nation's professional art tasters, 57 varieties of painting.

Running the gamut of styles, the show leaned to the progressive, contained few echoes of war, political plumping, or the soap-box exhortations fashionable a decade ago. There were elaborate, anything-but-immaculate conceptions which for untutored eyes might just as well have hung upside down. There were shaky, stuttering labors-in-oil by artists known chiefly to their immediate families, friends and critic-sponsors. There were also sober, estimable paintings by artists like Alexander Brook, John Carroll, Walt Kuhn, Raphael Soyer. Sample critics and choices:

P: New York Timesman Edward Alden Jewell, an imperceptibly left-of-center critic, chose William Thon's sweeping, salty view Under the Brooklyn Bridge. Critic Jewell, 57, has the same rambling sort of authority his paper has; his gentle, liberal, usually safe-&-sane voice is heard all over the U.S.

P: Shrill, scratch-penned Eleanor Jewett of Chicago's America-First Tribune put up a bald landscape of rolling hills and lowering sky, seen through a purplish haze of late-afternoon dusk: The Day Ends by Charles Kilgore.

P: Sixtyish, pince-nezed Harry Burke of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat voted for Missourian Fred Conway's Kids, a noisy battle waged by a back-lot army of small fry.

P: Oldster Royal Cortissoz of the New York Herald Tribune, the flatly conservative dean of U.S. newspaper art critics, offered Cincinnati a charming, flowing figure-piece: Jon Corbino's The Family. Connoisseur Cortissoz, erstwhile art crony of the J. P. Morgans, father & son, will tolerate no such modernistic nonsense as distorted proportions and experiments with the abstract. CJ Calm, fortyish Dorothy Adlow of the Christian Science Monitor picked a gaunt, naked vision, Ezekiel, a Biblical allegory (Ezekiel 37:3--Son of man, can these bones live?), by 29-year-old Bostonian Nathaniel Jacobson.

P: Ardent, assiduous Douglas Naylor of Pittsburgh's Press chose Marsha, a head of a saucer-eyed Negro child rendered in a distantly Renoir manner by Ohio-born Clarence Carter.

P: Amiable, grey-haired Frances ("Fannie") Bryson of the New Orleans Item selected Our Daily Bread, a heavily stylized landscape of Deep South farmland at sundown, replete with wheeling buzzards and eroding soil. The artist: Mississippian John McCrady.

P: Thin, long-haired Editor John Morse of Washington's monthly Magazine of Art chose Ben Shahn's provocatively-titled The Quartet (three men playing musical instruments).

P: Forty-six-year-old progressive John J. Sherman of the Minneapolis Star-Journal sent the Cincinnati show a swirling, semi-abstract Minnesota Landscape by Minneapolis Modernist Mac Le Sueur.

P: Informed, positive Editor Peyton Boswell Jr. of Manhattan's bimonthly Art Digest picked a rear view of two weighty bathers portrayed with Van Gogh vehemence in a framework of writhing earth and lowering sky: The Green Pool by Connecticut's Revington Arthur.

P: Wisp-haired, preoccupied Alfred Frankenstein of the San Francisco Chronicle chose a deft, architectonic watercolor of The Rockies by California's Dong Kingman.

Ignorance and Sycophancy. Most of the Cincinnati show's 57 critics write for daily newspapers; some double as book reviewers, music or theater critics; one covers the city hall on the side. Day by day) week after week, these men & women pass judgments on art which are read by thousands and, more often than not, taken seriously.

Along with their choices, several of the critics passed a few offhand judgments on their own profession. Wrote one: "My opinion of critics is not overly high; when not heirs of varnished ignorance most of them are addicts of sycophancy and mental laziness."

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