Freedom on Show

Splendidly displayed in the "Jungle-gym" designed by George Nelson, U.S. art at the Moscow exhibition is drawing upward of 20,000 people a day. Guards have a hard time keeping the crowd moving, not because people are impressed by the show so much as because puzzlement halts them. Jackson Pollock's drip picture called Cathedral stops visitors cold. "Where is the cathedral?" they ask. Andrew Wyeth's Children's Doctor and Edward Hooper's stark, vivid Lighthouse at Two Lights are the standout favorites. Among the sculptures on display, Gaston Lachaise's hugely curvaceous Standing Woman is a cynosure. Commented one visitor in the exhibition guest book: "We could use a hefty girl like that in our plant."

If the public is intrigued and bewildered, the official Moscow press is neither. Critical consensus: "Who needs it?" Apparently the Russians are even less accustomed than Americans are to seeing pictures on their own merits. But what the spectators chiefly wanted was explanation. Jack Levine's brilliantly painted Welcome Home, depicting a banquet for a dissolute-looking general (which President Eisenhower objected to as "a lampoon"), left the crowd cold until a label was attached explaining it as "anti-war." Since then, it has been a favorite. Likewise, Peter Blume's surrealistic The Eternal City, in which a bust of Benito Mussolini peers balefully across the Roman Forum, got low marks until it was labeled "antifascist."

The extraordinary breadth and variety of the exhibition made the unmistakable point that creative people vary, and that when they get the chance to create according to their own lights, they will produce variety and vitality along with a broad range of quality, from awful to wonderful. If the show made that point to the Russians, whose own official art amounts to hack illustrations of a deadly sameness, the U.S. might well rest content.

Nowhere did American freedom of thought have greater impact than in the presence of the show's contentious curator, Manhattan Art Dealer Edith Gregor Halpert. Last month Mrs. Halpert had said some harsh things about Eisenhower's reservations concerning the exhibition ("Some people think the President's paintings aren't so good either. It's like Truman saying modern art resembles ham and eggs"). One Soviet critic jeeringly asked her what had happened to the woman who criticized the President's judgment. "I am that woman," she said. The Russian was incredulous: "How did they ever let you out of the country after what you said?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.