Art in the Garden

In the space where the circus shows off its freaks, directly below the main arena where hockey players hack at one another with stick and skate, Madison Square Garden last week became a colossal art gallery. The most massive exhibition of U.S. painting and sculpture in decades--more than 1,500 works from 40 states and Hawaii--lined 4,200 running feet of plywood panels and sprawled over 40,000 sq. ft. of space in the Garden's basement Exposition Hall. The all-encompassing title of the show: "Art: U.S.A.: 58."

Behind the art extravaganza is crew-cut Lee Nordness, 33, a partner in a small Manhattan gallery called The Little Studio. Nordness first conceived of his grandiose plan last summer when a French art dealer gibed at him, "You Americans make your beautiful refrigerators and automobiles, and leave art to us." Then and there Nordness made up his mind that "what we need is a big, public show of contemporary American art, not only for the U.S. but for the world."

The Real Hunger. Nordness announced plans to take over Madison Square Garden, show 4,000 works of art painted in 1957. None was to be larger than 48 in. by 48 in. When fellow Manhattan art dealers predicted this would bring a deluge of mediocrities, Nordness agreed to have a jury whittle the entries down to about 1,000 volunteered works which would go into the show along with offerings from a specially invited group of already recognized name artists.

Though five Manhattan galleries turned away from what they considered a monstrous undertaking, Nordness himself got nearly $75,000 in backing, made the rounds of leading U.S. art centers preaching that "there is a real hunger for art if a show can be put on in a place where the public is not afraid to go." Winning the support of some 75 galleries, Nordness soon had to take over five stories of a warehouse to store the 7,000 paintings and sculptures that came rolling in, sweated through a fire that burned down the adjacent building, even surmounted a last-minute crisis when the beige cloth backdrops for the show were sent to Chicago by mistake.

Well before opening day, the jury* pared the show down to a grand total of 1,516 works, then passed over most of the better-known names and gave four of the seven $500 painting awards to artists still outside the gallery circuit, tapped lesser-knowns as well for the two $500 sculpture awards. The painting winners: Manhattan's Zygmunt Menkes for his bright Girl with Mirror; San Francisco's Frank Ashley for his lively #12 Adler (see color page): Manhattan's Louis Bouche for his quiet Still Life with Blocks; Westchester County's Edmond Fitzgerald for his ashcan-ish My Studio; Manhattan's Sidney Gross for his abstract Promontory; Brooklyn's Joan Starwood for her abstract Fugue in Blue-Green; and Manhattan's Erne Joseph for his abstract Intersectional. The sculpture winners: Peter Abate of Brookline, Mass, for. his tamely symbolic marble Beginning of Life; Arnold Geissbuhler of Manhattan for a bronze Bird, whose cock's crow hauntingly echoes the earlier work of Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz (see cuts).

The In-Between. Taken in its huge total, the show is more revealing of the plains and valleys than the mountain peaks of U.S. art, 1958. It suffers because many of the best refused to show with the crowd, but nevertheless it displays a competent level of workmanship. Said Juror Adolpb Gottlieb: "The show does constitute a cross section of contemporary American art, divided about fifty-fifty between abstraction and realism. It's good to have a big show, especially in New York. The worst and the best are excluded. What is hanging now is in the in-between level. The level is surprisingly good, if we consider how many bad pictures we saw before the show was selected."

With the whole spectrum of U.S. painting up on the walls and Madison Square Garden converted into a supermarket for art. Promoter Nordness hung on the turnstiles, at week's end seemed to have a fairchance of breaking even. Attendance (at 95-c-a head) for the first two days of the ten-day show: 6,942. Total picture sales: $15,175. At least the show had demonstrated the widespread, brush-in-hand U.S. interest in painting. With reasonable success in 1958, it might become a revealing annual event in U.S. art.

*Non-Objective Painter Adolph Gottlieb, Art Students League Director Stewart Klonis, Arts Publisher Jonathan Marshall, Old-Line Abstractionist George L. K. Morris, Realist Painter Ogden M. Pleissner and Sculptor William Zorach.

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