Ende Art

At the Carnegie International show in Pittsburgh last autumn, visitors in the German room stopped before an arresting painting that Critic Edward Alden Jewell described as "beautiful, breathless, haunted and haunting." It was Along the Shore, by a 33-year-old Munich artist named Edgar Ende, and although it won no prize, many a visitor wondered about the work of the artist who created its sombre vision of gloomy sky and water, its statuelike group of horses and men.

Last week at Chicago's Theobald Galleries Ende had his first one-man show, consisting of four oils, 19 drawings, four etchings. Member of a group of young Munich artists who have developed a type of surrealist symbolism, in which the trappings of 19th-Century romantic painting are employed as elements of fantastic design, Ende was making a name for himself when the Nazis came into power, slapped his work into the Degenerate Art show.

Chicago critics detected a quality of frustration and foreboding in Ende's painting, found that, in the world he presents, figures are stopped before a barrier, or seek shelter like the nudes in Under the Console (see cut). In Munich, where his lively little wife teaches physical culture, Ende has been caught like many a German painter in current confusions of German art: his painting has received the official thumbs-down that goes with inclusion in Hitler's Degenerate Art show, but he has been commissioned to do murals for Goering's air ministry.

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