Simple Masters

A spacious exhibition of U. S. advertising art, all sophistication, virtuosity and machine-tooling, ran through last month in the mezzanine galleries of Manhattan's Rockefeller Center. An equally spacious exhibition called "Masters of Popular Painting," all naivete, honesty and hand workmanship, opened last week in the Rockefeller Center Gallery of the Museum of Modern Art. Naive visitors were most impressed by the first; sophisticates by the second. But more than any U. S. show of modern art in recent years, including its own memorable presentations of Abstract Art and Surrealism in 1936, the Museum's exhibition last week brought together the art critic and the common man on common ground.

Ambiguously named, the exhibition showed 171 pieces of work by painters who were and are popular, not in the sense that they are well-known but in the sense that they are of the people. Workmen, small tradesmen, petty officeholders, to whom painting has not been a profession but an absorbing hobby, they differ from whittlers and builders of ship models only in their wish to re-create on canvas what they have seen or imagined. Only a few such amateurs have had the instincts and the industry to produce work of quality, but the same goes for professionals.

Appreciation of the "modern primitives" began in France in the 1890s with the discovery of Henri Rousseau, a mustachioed, simplehearted customs officer who painted streets and landscapes, real & imaginary, with a mystical precision which a few artists like Gauguin had the wit to envy. He and other primitive realists have since been taken up as a kind of refuge by the same generation which produced Cubism and the ensuing rarefactions of abstract art. A brilliant show of Maitres Populaires de la Realite was organized last summer in Paris, then shown in Zurich and London, and borrowed, with additions, for the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition. An American section, almost as large, was assembled by the Museum.

Everybody's knockout in the French section was a collection of 29 paintings by Camille Bombois, a burly, snapping-eyed bargeman's son who started life as a circus wrestler, survived four and one-half years of War and won three medals in the French army. Painter Bombois, 55, paints his vivid world of blue water, green foliage and fat women with the fresh eye of a five-year-old and the meticulous craft of an engraver. His childhood liking of river reflections has produced many such pictures as Girl Reading in a Boat (see cut). Equally clear-cut and refreshing, if less powerful, were paintings by Dominique-Paul Peyronnet, a lithographer; Rene Rimbert, a chief postal clerk; Adolf Dietrich, a Swiss rabbit-breeder.

Among the Americans the place of honor went to three paintings by Joseph Pickett, a carpenter of New Hope, Pa., whose pictures brought $1 apiece at an auction after his death in 1918. Entirely self-taught, Pickett made his own colors and tried to duplicate the textures of the things he painted. The results were remarkable scene-patterns about as near to the stuff of a native U. S. fairy book as anyone has come. Grimmest pictures in the show were the strong and laborious productions of John Kane, the Pittsburgh house painter who died in 1934.

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