Profile of War

Exhibited at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week were three types of art from three nations. In one room were examples of U. S. industrial art in machined metal and glass. In another the Museum displayed modern furniture, scientifically designed in pale plywood by the brilliant Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto. Balancing these examples of machine and functional art was a third room in which visitors found reportorial art of the most sensitive kind--an exhibition of 105 drawings made in Spain by the Leftist artist, Luis Quintanilla.

A Basque, a nephew of a Bishop of Burgos, Luis Quintanilla was at one time a student at the Jesuit University of Deusto near Bilbao. Before the World War and before he was 20, he lived with the late Cubist Juan Gris in a leaky studio on the Place des Abbesses. Paris, learned to paint, he says, by "talking about it all the time." Little known in Spain until 1927, when he returned to Madrid after two years in Florence, he gradually became recognized as one of the finest artists of the people since Goya. While he was in prison for his Socialism in 1931, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passes got him his first one-man show in the U. S. In July 1936, he finished his most ambitious mural, eleven panels containing 140 life-size figures, for Madrid's monument to the founder of Spanish Socialism, Pablo Iglesias. A few nights later Painter Quintanilla made himself a hero of the Republic by directing the attack which took the Montana barracks in Madrid.

While bombs and shell fire were making rubble out of Luis Quintanilla's murals and his studio near University City, he fought with the Leftist infantry in the Guadarrama Mountains, at Toledo and in Madrid. In the fourth month of the war the Government carefully sent him out of danger on a diplomatic mission to France. Last June it let him return for six months of sketching along the front from Madrid to Teruel. After showing his drawings in Barcelona last December, Artist Quintanilla packed them, frames and all, in six padded trunks and took ship for the U. S. In a little studio on Washington Square near the house of his host, Writer Jay Allen, he has lately been doing his first painting in two years. A small, sombre, keen-witted man in casual brown clothes, 43-year-old Artist Quintanilla had it in mind last week to quit painting again, go back to help his friends in Spain.

The Quintanilla drawings show war's effects on the streets of Madrid and Almeria, on the villagers of Andalusia surprised by bombing and strafing airplanes, on Moorish, Italian, German and Spanish prisoners, on wounded men in hospitals. Seeming as delicately bitten as etchings, they were done with a fine quill pen in a uniformly unexcited style. Ruins of masonry, the broken bodies of the dead, the brutalized bodies of the living, all were recorded with the same hard outline and shading, the same careful, slightly grotesque composition. By this apparent monotony and coldness Artist Quintanilla made a profile of Spain's war with a more cutting edge than the work of any artist who has dramatized it.

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