Art of the Americans

At the New York World's Fair exhibition of "American Art Today" (TIME, May 15), a belated opening ceremony took place last week. One thing none of the felicitous speakers remarked upon was the fact that, huge as it is, this exhibition does not live up to its title. To do so, it would have to represent not the artists of the U. S. alone but those of all the far-flung Americas.

But if Pan-Americanism in the arts lags behind Pan-Americanism in politics there was evidence in Manhattan that it at least exists. Opened at the Riverside Museum was the first sizable exhibition ever held in the U. S. of contemporary art from Latin-American countries. Its somewhat anomalous front man: Secretary of Agriculture Henry Agard Wallace, in his capacity as Chairman of the United States New York World's Fair Commission. To Henry Wallace's invitation, nine nations had responded with 343 works of art.

For U. S. visitors who went to see the choicest art of the hemisphere, the exhibition provided one big disappointment and one pleasant surprise. The disappointment was the Brazilian section, which seemed to have been picked by a myopic bartender and consisted almost exclusively of washed-out imitation of European academicism. That a native art of considerable vigor is budding in Brazil, World's Fair visitors have already learned from murals in the Brazilian pavilion by Rio de Janeiro's popular, roly-poly Candido Portinari. There was nothing by him in the show.

The pleasant surprise was the Cuban section. Its 40 items included the tenderest painting in the exhibition, a picture of three lost-looking children done in white, grey and sepia by a young artist named Fidelio Ponce de Leon,* and the most effective sculpture, a torqued Figure (see cut, p. 36) by handsome, 27-year-old Rita Longa. Significantly enough, Rita Longa is chief of the Section of Teaching and Art Appreciation in the Department of Culture under the Cuban Ministry of Education. This department was created after the overthrow of President Gerardo ("Butcher") Machado in 1933 and is regarded by Cuban artists as a great national victory for the liberal and lively enjoyment of art.

From Mexico came minor pictures by the masters, including Jean Chariot, and from Argentina and Chile a number of works lustrous with contemporaneity. Guatemala, Ecuador, Paraguay and the Dominican Republic were represented by curiosities rather than quality, but the whole show was a sidelong stride toward the "intellectual interchange" agreed upon at the Lima Conference.

* No kin to the famed fountain-hunter.

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