"American Challenge"

Up for judgment in Manhattan's galleries last week, as in every week of the art season (October-May), was enough canvas to put sails on a four-master and enough sculpture to ballast one. Some 60 U. S. artists were there, of all ages, regions and schools, plus a varied assortment of Europeans. In time, they ranged from Duerer to Disney. In place, they ranged the globe.

The Ferargil Galleries showed the raw-colored, precise paintings of Georgian Lamar Dodd, one of the South's few good painters. The Boyer Galleries showed the kaleidoscopic water colors of Nathaniel Dirk, a camoufleur in World War I. In the Bonestell Gallery, Frenchman Jean Charlot, a founding father of the famed Mexican school, exhibited deceptively simple pictures of broad, squat peons and solemn babies. The Downtown Gallery had as fine a first one-man show as a crowded season has seen--Julian Levis serene, spacious paintings of the seaside.

Topping them all was the James Chapin retrospective at the Associated American Artists' Galleries. For it, Critic Edward Alden Jewell went off the deep end. Wrote he: "It establishes his position as second to none in our contemporary roster. It contains some of the finest painting of our time. It ... constitutes a full and ringing American challenge. In a word, this show is the real thing."

Not American but post-Impressionist French were the canvases of agile, sensitive James Chapin up to 1924. Cezanne was his idol. That year he left Greenwich Village, took a walking trip in the hills of northern New Jersey. There he found a two-room log cabin, decided it would be a quiet place to paint. He rented it for $4 a month from the Marvins, a tightfisted, hard-working farm family.

Soon Artist Chapin got so absorbed in spare, taciturn, unschooled Emmet, George and Ella Marvin that he stopped painting cubist arrangement of rocks, scaffolding and apple trees, became instead a limner of the U. S. scene long before it became the popular thing. The suspicious Marvins would not pose at first, thawed when he worked with them in the fields, helped round up the pigs. For five years he stirred from the farm no more than the Marvins did, sketched them ploughing, foxhunting, planting potatoes, sharpening a scythe, clustered round their old iron kitchen range. The paintings that resulted are strong, bleak, solid as the Jersey hills.

But Artist Chapin is no repeater of formulas. In 1929 he left his log cabin and went back to Manhattan. His brush has since touched many another phase of U. S. life--touts, lobster fishermen, subways, baseball players, blues singers, lime kilns, Utah strawstacks. Sometimes his paintings are crisp and tight, sometimes loose and fluid. They are always vital. At 53, an art teacher one day a week at the Pennsylvania Academy, James Chapin is still undogmatic. "We are all students together," says he. "I'm trying to learn how to paint too."

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