Lenten Lights

To rest their eyes from newspaper headlines (see p. 19), Manhattanites last week thronged into half-a-dozen first-rate exhibitions which made the season of Lent almost an art season in itself.

Morgan. Arrayed with scholarship and point in the quiet rooms of the Morgan Library were illuminated manuscripts, art objects and drawings from the 9th to the 17th Century, portraying the Passion, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ. Choice items: a recently acquired 14th-century missal illuminated by the great Niccolo da Bologna; a gold and enamel 12th-Century altar; Raphael's original drawing of the Agony in the Garden for a famed altarpiece owned by the Metropolitan Museum.

Venetian. At the Metropolitan, the Old Master of the year continued to make news after a triumphant first U. S. exhibition last month at the Chicago Art Institute.* This was the 18th-Century Venetian, Giambattista Tiepolo, a full-blown baroque virtuoso far removed from the devout art of the Middle Ages. Not half so rich in paintings as the Chicago show, the Metropolitan's boasted more of Tiepolo's round, rapid sketches and one of his ceilings, famed for the azure into which he tossed swirling goddesses, angels and garlands of cherubs to float upward, bottoms down, in heavenly perspective.

Bravura was the word for Giovanni Boldini, whose society paintings in the period from 1890 to 1910 were the quintessence which John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Howard Chandler Christy and Charles Dana Gibson diluted, in ascending order of popularity, descending order of excellence. Last week at the Newhouse Galleries Manhattanites were surprised and seduced by the 68 brilliant, relatively intimate paintings, crayons and drawings which the 89-year-old Italian left in his Paris studio at his death in 1931. In his smaller works (minimum price: $400 for a sketch) Boldini showed a direct mastery of the Proustian atmospheres which he heightened to exoticism in his fake, flower-like portraits of women.

Humanity, of which Boldini had one understanding, is the constant subject of sad-eyed, diminutive Raphael Soyer, who has another. His twin, Moses, and his Brother Isaac are also able painters, but in the last few years Raphael's single-minded portrayals of pathos in Manhattan's sober poor have given him the greater reputation. Last week his first one-man show since 1935, at the Valentine Gallery, brought 14th Street impressively to fashionable 57th. In Soyer's accomplished paintings of Greenwich Village characters there was neither humor nor brilliance but a great deal of dun truth.

Great Portraits. Last week some 2,000 Manhattanites spent the price of a movie to see what some critics considered the most stunning show of the year. Arranged by a long list of socialite sponsors for the benefit of the public Education Association of New York, it was correctly entitled "Great Portraits from Impressionism to Modernism." In the lofty, skylit galleries of Wildenstein & Co. visitors saw 48 selected masterpieces by Cezanne, Manet, Renoir, Gauguin, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Marie Laurencin, Matisse, Derain, Pascin, Picasso, Modigliani. Visitors who regarded any of these reputations as unfounded were quickly disabused.

Gropper. At bald, velvet-eyed Herman Baron's A.C.A. Gallery last week the best sharpshooter of all U. S. cartoonists had his third show of notable paintings. William Gropper is a short, thick man with dreamy grey eyes and an air of subdued but uninhibited amusement. He paints as he draws for the New Masses, from memory or imagination, as fast as he can and as briefly, with rich reds, yellows and slashing whites. Last summer he spent three months in the West, exhibited the results last week. Among them: Waiting (see cut), a Kansas cow, dying of thirst, on whom the buzzards have already lit; Security, showing more fortunate horses grazing on a prairie hill while a family whirls topsy-turvy in the sky above them. Not Surrealist was Artist Gropper's explanation: "It's quite literal--the cattle have some security but the people are up in the air. More generally, everything is beautiful, the country is nice, but where in hell are we?"

* In memoriam of the Institute's able, longtime Director Robert Bartholow Harshe, who died in Chicago last January.

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