Primitives

The Press had been fully instructed, but the general public had some difficulty in getting into New York's newest art rooms last week, the American Folk Art Gallery. The A. F. A. G.'s mission, say its promoters, is to exhibit and sell American Primitives. Connected with the enterprise as an adviser is little, round Holger Cahill, onetime press-agent and at present consultant for the Newark Museum of Art.

Ready to open in November is the Whitney Museum of American Art. Backed by Sculptress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, it is an outgrowth of the old Whitney Studio Club. The Whitney Museum's director is a Mrs. Juliana Force. For the past two years she has been gathering a large collection of the unsigned portraits, landscapes and inn signs of early U. S. journeyman painters. This was to be one of the big features of the Whitney Museum's opening. Mr. Cahill is accused of admiring the Whitney Museum collection sufficiently to imitate the idea, spoil the Whitney Museum's surprise. Critics paid little attention to the Whitney-Cahill tiff but did raise surprised eyebrows in the American Folk Art Gallery. Most of the American primitive paintings seen in Newark, yet to be seen in the Whitney Museum, either were sufficiently well painted to stand on their own merits, or with their old, softened colors had something of the ingenuous attractiveness of the early work of the French Customs Agent Henri Rousseau. There were few such pictures for sale at the Folk Art Gallery. Instead there was a wide variety of cigar store Indians, wooden decoy ducks,* hobby horses, cast iron hitching posts, cast iron stove plates, weather vanes and examples of tatting and painting on velvetEN_P]

* Abercrombie & Fitch, Manhattan sporting goods store, last week held an exhibition of duck decoys, including the original over which President Grover Cleveland first shot.

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