Critic's Choice

J. P. Morgan lent three Holbeins. The Metropolitan Museum sent down El Greco's View of Toledo and John Singer Sargent's portrait of Padre Sebastiano. Mrs. George Bellows lent her husband's famous picture of Edith Cavell. The Whitney Museum, the Phillips Memorial in Washington, the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, all removed priceless works from their walls to send to Knoedler's in Manhattan, because an art critic liked them.

Thus Knoedler's (celebrating its 95th birthday) last week celebrated Royal Cortissoz' 50th anniversary as an art critic (for the New York Herald Tribune) with an exhibition of the pictures the twinkling old gentleman liked best in the whole U.S.

Manhattan gallerygoers, long familiar with Critic Cortissoz' crisply expressed enthusiasms and prejudices, were not surprised to find few 20th-century paintings in his hand-picked anthology. In the exclusive company of Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Renoir, only twelve U.S. artists (all dead) made the grade.

Critic Cortissoz' profession of faith, written as an introduction for the catalogue of the show: "I believe that a work of art is the outcome of a spiritual process, involving the artist's mind and heart and imagination, all acting in the language of proficient craftsmanship and enriched by the crowning element of style."

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