Surprises from All Over

Art is a universal language--at least in theory. To prove it, UNESCO borrowed some 900 contemporary paintings from 30 countries, hung them, in Paris' marble Museum of Modern Art. UNESCO's delegates had already departed when the International Show finally closed its doors last week. It had been perhaps the most comprehensive exhibition of its kind ever assembled, big enough to turn up a number of surprises.

Paris museumgoers noted with complacent smiles that most of the exhibition's far-flung artists painted with a Paris accent. Parisians preferred the genuine article, in an upstairs room full of Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard and Rouault.

The U.S. contingent represented an unknown frontier for French critics, and they explored it warily. The 84 uniformly small canvases (by such local big shots as Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler and Morris Kantor) had been recently acquired by the State Department. It looked as though the State Department had kept within its budget by accepting second-best samples which might impress Paris by the originality, but not the quality, of U.S. taste.

The British did better in French eyes. Leaving out such sure-fire conservatives as famed old portraitist Augustus John, their exhibition was built around Frenchified Britishers like Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland.

But UNESCO's standouts were a few far-corner exceptions to the French rule of modern art. Among them:

P: Jamini Roy, a Calcutta "primitive" who quit his highbrow protrait business to paint flat, bright figures like the ones which decorate Bengali pots and dolls. Jamini (rhymes with Tammany) makes his own paints from rock dust, mud, chalk and tamarind seeds, keeps a back-roomful of helpers grinding out copies of his wasp-waisted festival dancers, friendly tigers and almond-eyed Christs.

P: An unknown Nigerian who painted an insanely gay parade on a wall at Umuahia about 1935. UNESCO director-general Julian Huxley had seen it there, contributed his photographs of the mural to the show.

P: Pou Jou, whose windy, black Horse partook of China's ancient tradition of concise yet highly emotional brush drawing. Pou Jou's Horse laid special emphasis on "rhythmic vitality," the first of six canons formulated by the 6th Century artist Hsieh Ho.

Painting Priest. Hit of the show was Haiti's entry: 28 stiffly drawn, riotously colored genre paintings and still lifes by such esoteric unknowns as Hector Hyppo-lite, a voodoo priest who claims his brush is guided by St. John the Baptist; a 24-year-old ex-houseboy named Castera Bazile, and Louverture Poisson, a mechanic in the Haitian Air Force. They were all the proteges of a self-effacing young U.S. artist with a mission.

Dewitt Peters, a Californian who had moved to Port-au-Prince for his health, started Haiti's first art school three years ago, just to make himself useful. As soon as his Centre d'Art opened its doors, self-taught painters came crowding happily in for instruction. Peters stared at their pink, purple, pale green and yellow pictures of murders and bouquets (mostly painted with furniture enamel on scraps of cardboard), decided the best he could do for such talented pupils was to supply them with materials and let them paint.

Peters got educational grants from both the Haitian Government and Washington for his pupils, last year voted himself a $25-a-week salary. Now he is touring Haiti in a well-decorated jeep, setting up branch art schools in the villages. If he has his way, little Haiti will shout the universal language of art from 1947 on.

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