Moderns in the Maize

What was happening in Iowa City said one critic, should not happen even in a Manhattan museum. The State University had put on a summer show of 160 modern pictures, and there was not one old-fashioned landscape in the lot. Instead there were angular moderns, surrealist viscera and patterned streaks and splotches.

Some lowans liked what they saw-others sent letters of protest to the show's director, Lester D. Longman, who is trying to convince his fellow lowans that there is more to art than Grant Wood ever dreamed of. Wrote Editor Don Berry of the Indianola Record Herald and Tribune (circ. 3,693): Such paintings could only come from the mentally unbalanced. (The paintings come from such old hands at modernism as Stuart Davis, Fernand Leger, Karl Zerbe and Salvador Dali.)

To critics, Dr. Longman retorted: "The present exhibition is too conservative. . . . One might reasonably conclude that the world has gone crazy. This is also the impression you get from your newspaper. The artists themselves are barometric not crazy. . . ."

An art jury had picked out twelve pictures it thought Iowa should buy for the university's permanent collection. Last week Director Longman put all the money into one picture. For $5,000 he bought German exile Max Beckmann's enigmatic Tryptych-Carnival. The other 159 pictures could be bought by interested lowans. So far only a few were that interested.

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