Tri-National

Pablo Picasso, the artist, likes fried eggs. They probably taste to him much as they taste to another man, but because he is a great painter he is capable of liking them more passionately and more concretely than your common fellow. It is not merely their savor that appeals to him; it is their mass and rhythm. The concentric ovals of their yolks and whites, the fecund chromes bewitched to a dark gold, haunt his dreams with the memory of a beauty marvelous and fugitive. To satisfy the demands of that memory, he painted them, the fried eggs of his dream, in a form as compact as a concerto--a form that leaves upon the mind of the beholder a sensation as definite as that caused by a series of musical chords. They smile down forever from his rich canvas--the Cosmic Egg cooked at last, the fried ova of eternity. This celebrated picture has been seen before in Manhattan. It was exhibited there again last week at the opening of the trinational exhibition of the painting and sculpture of France, England and the U. S. assembled by Mrs. E. H. Harriman (TIME, Dec. 28).

The objects are not segregated in race divisions but hung together in a harmonious whole to carry out "the idea of international sympathy." There were studies of a cow, a cat, a goose, and a donkey by Jeanne Poupelet; compositions by such Frenchmen as Derain, Andre, Rouault, Aristide Maillol; by Augustus John and Jacob Epstein; by George Luks, Jo Davidson, Childe Hassam, Gertrude Whitney and Robert W. Chanler. The metropolitan critics, loyal patriots all, generously discussed the merits of the U. S. paintings: "Jazz," an experiment in abstract form by Man-Ray, an American living in Paris; a picture by Edward Hopper of a lonely blue house with a mansard roof, a lookout and three men in a boat called "The Bootleggers"; Thomas Benton's "New England." These subjects are indeed native. But if Mrs. Harriman has rendered an important service to art in her tri-national exhibition (and it is general opinion that she has), her service has been to demonstrate once more, by direct comparison, the fatuity of American painting.