AMERICANS AT BRUSSELS:

Soft Sell, Range & Controversy

FOR the thousands who eddy each day through the 470-acre exhibit-packed Brussels World's Fair, the U.S. Pavilion, with its open plaza, reflecting pool and splashing fountains, has become a star attraction. But what is inside the lofty, translucent drum designed by Architect Edward D. Stone (TIME, Cover, March 31) has become the subject of a running controversy, at home and abroad. Main reason is that the U.S., setting out to give its interpretation of a new humanism tailored to fit the Atomic Age, decided it could win more friends by using the soft sell. The result has led many a critic to charge that the sell is so soft that it has given a fuzzy picture of the U.S.

No other aspect of the U.S. exhibition, which ranges from fashion show to soda-serving drug counter, has raised such a ruckus as the choice of U.S. art (see color pages). The original intent, outlined by American Federation of Arts Director Harris K. Prior, was to document the proposition: "Nowhere in the world can man live a complete life without the beneficent presence of the visual arts. In America, because of the highly mechanized civilization and the abundance of leisure time, they are perhaps even more necessary than elsewhere."

To give a cross section of this beneficent presence, from, the most naive form to the most sophisticated, the U.S. fair staff appointed experts to pick 181 paintings, sculptures and craft objects, and divided them into four different exhibits. Contemporary sculpture was placed in the pavilion's interior pool; displays featuring 41 examples of native Indian art, a wide selection of American folk art, and, most controversial of all, 44 paintings by 17 artists under 45 now working from Manhattan to San Francisco, were spread out elsewhere in the building.

Pleased: None. It was a selection that pleased none. As soon as the choices were announced (and before they were seen), critical guns took aim from the whole perimeter of opinion. Cried New York Herald Tribune Art Critic Emily Genauer: "Our exhibits will indeed be a scandal." Her objections centered on the absence of traditional painters, and the emphasis on abstraction. The New York Daily News predicted an "atrocity," called for reinforcements from Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell.

The partisans of abstraction were equally upset. With U.S. abstract expressionist art shows now winning an international audience,-they feared that the U.S. at Brussels had been trapped into scattering its fire, was in danger of losing the initiative already gained. Art News Executive Editor Thomas B. Hess labeled the U.S. representation at the fair a comical scandal, lacking in seriousness. He called for an all-out showing of the serious abstract painters and sculptors who "in the past 15 years have exerted an international influence, from Japan to Rome."

Bombarded with advice, harassed U.S. commissioners vainly pointed out that many of the U.S. big names were accounted for in the fair's top art attraction, "Fifty Years of Modern Art," a worldwide roundup that includes such leading U.S. painters as Realist Edward Hopper, Ben Shahn, and abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. In an effort to achieve a last-minute save, Architect Ed Stone teamed up with Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art, added 15 paintings by such artists as Charles Sheeler, Stuart Davis, Charles Burchfield, Reginald Marsh to the commissioner general's area in the U.S. Pavilion (where they are, unfortunately, seldom seen by run-of-the-fair visitors).

Result: Neither, Nor. After all the advance furor, the U.S. exhibit turned out to be neither so bad as the critics predicted nor so good as it might have been. The well-lighted displays of Indian art collected by Manhattan's Rockefeller-founded Museum of Primitive Art, admittedly provincial and primitive by comparison with the far richer Aztecs, Mayas and Incas, give the European fair visitors a look at a little-known realm of primitive art. American folk art, drawn by the Smithsonian Institution from such rich sources as the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art and Garbisch collections, gives a good, gusty look at America's untrained craftsmen at work on poised weathervanes, cigar-store Indians and crude but straightforward portraits.

The works that get the closest and most perplexed going-over are the 44 abstract paintings by artists under 45. Picked by a three-man jury composed of Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator Robert Beverly Hale, Minneapolis' Walker Art Center Director H. Harvard Arnason and San Francisco Museum of Art Director Dr. Grace L. McCann Morley, they are supposed to show a "growing edge" of creative expression. Bewildered and amused Europeans pepper the girl guides with questions: "Why is there nothing realistic, like the Russians have?" "Can these artists really draw?" There is further puzzlement over the huge mural by The New Yorker's Cartoonist Saul Steinberg, which spoofs the U.S. in a way that amuses knowing Americans but only tends to baffle other visitors to the fair. After a week of watching fair crowds thronging through the U.S. exhibits, one U.S. observer summed up: "Some are puzzled, some think it is plain crazy, some love it. But the exciting thing is that everyone reacts."

Muted Message. Across from the U.S. Pavilion, the U.S.S.R. sets out to overwhelm with towering Russian workers in bronze, and heavy-handed official works such as Y. N. Tulin's The Lena River, 1912, with the explanatory title: "Burying of the gold mine workers shot down by the Czarist government in the strike of 1912." Near by, Vatican City has produced one of the best shows of all. Called Imago Christi, it shows 100 sacred images, ranging from the 4th century A.D. to the present. France has crowded into too small a space a fine collection of works by Matisse, Modigliani, Rouault and Braque, along with contemporaries like Bernard Buffet. Mexico displays its Big Four: Siqueiros, Rivera, Orozco and Tamayo.

Against such competition, the U.S. show has brought reactions that range from rage to rave. British Art Critic Douglas Cooper called it "so miscalculated as to be boring and ultimately comic." Paul C. Mills, 33, curator of the Oakland (Calif.) Art Museum, said: "There is no question that the American art section is decidedly the best. No one else comes close."

The fact lies somewhere between those extremes. In contrast with the Soviet exhibit, the U.S. show makes an important point. The purpose of the Soviet's towering statues of Lenin in bronze or Finnish granite is clear and explicit. The spidery, welded-steel world of U.S. sculpture and the splashy abstractions on canvas are not state-commissioned, nor likely to be. They leave no doubt that in the U.S. an artist is free to pursue his personal vision and interpretation. The hope of the U.S. show is that this unique message of freedom will make its way through the bewilderment.

*A traveling show of 81 paintings by 17 present-day abstract painters is currently at Milan's Gallery of Modern Art, and a one-man retrospective by the late Jackson Pollock is on a seven month tour in Europe.

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