Year

(See following supplement)

Last week contemporary historians in their hallowed hour of retrospect could not fail to be struck by the dramatic character of 1937 in the field of art. During the spring and summer, paintings by El Greco and other great works belonging to galleries in Madrid, notably the Prado Museum, were removed under fire to Valencia and in some cases to Paris. While Spanish artists in Spain stubbornly ignored the war if they could, in Paris Spaniard Pablo Picasso found the perfect subject for his new horror-mangled style in a huge mural, The Bombing of Guernica, for the Spanish Government Building of the International Exposition. Meanwhile the choicest exhibition of French masterpieces ever held attracted Paris visitors to the Palais National des Arts. In Munich Reichsfuehrer Adolf Hitler dedicated a new Hall of German Art with a go-minute denunciation of surrealist and abstract painting. In the U.S. an abstract painting, The Yellow Cloth by Cubist Georges Braque, won First Prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition (TIME, Oct. 25).

Against this international background. Art in the U. S. had a less turbulent but no less significant year. All authorities agreed that the wave of public interest in painting which began during Depression rolled on, getting higher. In February the superb exhibition of pictures by Vincent van Gogh, assembled by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art in 1935, closed in Manhattan after being seen by 900,000 people in nine cities, a record for traveling shows in the U. S. surpassed only by Whistler's Mother (TIME, Nov. 14, 1932). In November the all-pervading Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration completed its first two years. Among its accomplishments were a much-publicized renaissance of mural painting, a great work of national scholarship in the Index of American Design,* free art classes for children and adults in about 60 towns and cities, the employment of 5,000 artists. The year was also notable for two great gifts to the public by rich men: the Mellon collection to the U. S. Government and the exceptional Bache collection to the State of New York. Late in the autumn publishers awoke to the fact that no season in many years had been so thickly plummed with instructive, inexpensive books on art.

U. S Painting. As aware of European styles as ever before, U. S. artists last year showed a maturing independence of them. Nineteen thirty-seven opened with the important Surrealist Exhibition at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art and closed with an exhibition of The Eternal City by Peter Blume, whose work has been called "an American form of Surrealism." But the definite character and strength of U. S. painting is nowhere clearer than in the fact that Blume's painting is actually not Surrealist but an original, explicitly symbolic picture designed to say a good deal to the waking, not the subconscious, mind. To many critics the year in U. S. painting was full of striking evidence of this growth of intellectual freedom side by side with esthetic sobriety.

Noticeable by their absence from the list of painters producing fresh work in 1937 were three artists who won great acclaim three years ago for opening up "The American Scene." John Steuart Curry of Kansas, occupied by a new job as resident artist at the University of Wisconsin, sent mostly old work to the big exhibitions, prepared for a one-man show of his own in Manhattan this month. Grant Wood of Iowa exhibited but one new canvas. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, after finishing his murals for the Missouri State Capitol (TIME, Jan. 1, 1937), made news with an autobiography, An Artist in America, filled with lusty anecdote and insistence on the value of open air for the U.S. painter.

Meanwhile younger painters of ability rose to carry on this tradition of journalistic painting, in which Curry and Benton are the successors of Sloan, Luks, Bellows and other realists of the early 1900s. Aaron Bohrod of Chicago went South and West, brought back Audubon Park, New Orleans and other canvases which surprised and delighted critics, won him a prize at the Chicago Art Institute. Mervin Jules of Baltimore showed one of the keenest and most varied talents of the year in his one-man show of satires and proletarian paintings in November. Both these artists went in for less decorative and, e. g. in Jules's Mine Baseball, more class-conscious work than the older triumvirate of "The American Scene." A lighter-spirited young artist who made his mark in 1937 is John McCrady of New Orleans, a Southern painter whose work was the purest example of regional art that turned up during the year.

Among journalistic painters who are clearly revolutionary-proletarian, the most noteworthy artist of the year was William Cropper, whose picture of a manhunt was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art last spring. To most critics Cropper's work seemed definitely superior in technique and feeling to the new paintings by St. Louis' Joe Jones, the proletarian discovery of 1935. On a trip West last summer Cartoonist Cropper, influenced more by Daumier and Goya than by modern Europeans, saw the bumper harvest of 1937, responded with Threshers and several other peaceful paintings.

The 19th-Century American spirit of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins has its present-day vessel in Edward Hopper, who has even done Civil War paintings. In 1937 his Cape Cod Afternoon won first prize at Washington's Corcoran Gallery and was one of the two U. S. paintings bought by the Carnegie Institute. But like Eugene Speicher, whose two best figure paintings other than The Actress were acquired by the Toledo Museum and the Whitney Museum, Hopper is contempo rary chiefly in the sense that he is reportorial. Last year revealed few imaginative painters who vaguely promised to equal Franklin Watkins' crackling human fantasies (e. g., The Fire Eater), John Marin's super-visual grasp of nature, even John Carroll's graces or such obvious intimations of mortality as Georgia O'Keeffe set down in From the Far Away Nearby. That sort of thing was not in the cards for 1937. The most impressive U. S. painting of the year was The Eternal City, and even that was an example of what Gertrude Stein called "this thing, this writing which is the painting every one is now doing."

Art Business in 1937 was good, but the slump cut it down considerably. An artist's wholesaler is his dealer; his market is the public museum, the private collector and, since WPA came, the Government. In the U. S. last year there were 415 deal ers in the fine arts. In New York City at year's end there were more by about 50% than in 1936.

Most U. S. artists are the opposite of prolific, and only a few can live comfortably on their sales without some form of continuing support such as WPA has provided. Contrary to popular belief, in most cases it is not the dealer but the artist who pays for the gallery show by which public and critical attention is attracted to his work. Usual cost: anywhere from $150 for a modest show to $500 for a big one with a cocktail party preview. About the lowest price on a first-rate U. S. painting last year was $100. The highest price of the year was asked by Peter Blume for his three-year job The Eternal City: $15,000. Average price of an average painting by one of the top 20 or 30 U. S. painters is between $600 and $1,000. Of this the dealer customarily gets one-third.

A time-honored gripe of U. S. artists is that big museums do not buy enough works by living artists. This is true, but it is not true without qualifications which irate artists usually omit. Last year the favorite butt of these attacks, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bought no less than 28 paintings by contemporary U. S. artists, including Waldo Peirce, William Gropper, George Biddle. In general, museums have not only loosened up in this respect, but have begun to spend less money on the acquisition of sacred masterpieces and more on a job just as essential to the artist: public art education. Since 1932, for one example, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, besides covering brilliantly every present-day trend in art, has circulated 43 traveling, exhibitions at rentals of from $15 to $500 each for 448 showings throughout the U. S.

At the big ceremonial museum shows of U. S. painting, artists reach their widest public. Conspicuously successful in 1937 were the biennial show of the Corcoran Art Gallery in April, the U. S. room at the Carnegie International, the more select and sparkling show of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum in November, and the even more select exhibition of "Paintings for Paris" which the Museum of Modern Art put on display during November and December--paintings by 36 U. S. artists chosen to be among those whose work the Museum plans to take to Paris this spring for the first big exhibition of U. S. painting ever held in Europe.

*Craft and decorative work in the U. S. from the 17th to the 20th Century in about 6,000 facsimile renderings.

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