Marooned on the Left Bank

From a steamer in Manhattan harbor last week debarked a refugee French painter with his wife and two infant sons. He was Andre Masson, a short, red-faced surrealist whose wireworky portraits of dismembered fish and ectoplasmic corpses had won him a reputation in pre-war France as one of modern art's finest flowers. Said he: "It is now just about a full year that I have been traveling. I am a curiosity even to myself."; Many of Surrealist Masson's fellow artists were still in Europe, either could not or would not leave.

> In France, awaiting papers and passage to the U.S., were 74-year-old Abstractionist Wossily Kandinsky, Surrealists Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall. En route was French Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.

> Caught by the German invasion of The Netherlands, but still working in his Amsterdam studio, was Max Beckmann, an "Aryan" expressionist regarded by many, before Hitler, as Germany's No. 1 painter. In London, Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka was trying to find a boat that would take him to the U.S.

> Making the best of it in Unoccupied France, Painters Raoul Dufy and Jean Lurc,at were designing modern tapestries at Aubusson. Famed 71-year-old Veteran Henri Matisse, entirely recovered from a recent illness, was in seclusion in his studio at Nice.

> Still sticking to their beloved Paris, Hitler or no, were six of the most famed figures in contemporary art: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Andre Derain, Georges Rouault, Maurice de Vlaminck, Marcel Duchamp. To them the German army of occupation had extended special privileges, including an extra ration of coal.

Though Propaganda Minister Goebbels' chamber of Nazi culture still frowned officially on "degenerate art," German army officers were reported buying up all the French modern art they could lay hands on.

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