Sneak Preview

Of all the nation's art students, from discontented debutantes to determined G.I.s, only a handful will ever make the grade. But the future of U.S. art rests with that handful. Last week the Addison Gallery at Andover, Mass. staged a sneak preview of what some of the more promising students are up to. Gallery Director Bartlett Hayes Jr. had arranged a similar cross-section show last year (TIME, Aug. 16, 1948); this year he invited 25 schools not represented in the first exhibition to submit their prize work. The entries covered the U.S. from Oregon to Alabama, included a smattering of good pictures, most of which turned out to have been painted by students in their late 20s.

One of the best in the show, a tempera House by the Seashore (see cut) by the University of Wisconsin's Ray Obermayr, owed an obvious debt to the two living U.S. masters: Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper. It struck a low blue note characteristic of the exhibition as a whole. Buffalo's Hubert Raczka had painted a lonely little figure through the bars of a fire escape, called it Insignificance. The Portland Museum School's Robert Galaher had wrapped his hulking Circus Worker in a sad, smokelike haze, and Milwaukee's John Pagac had contributed a fatly photographic Self-Portrait that might have been inspired by reflections in a beer bottle on a morning-after.

Such dead-earnest studies as Joel Reeves's shadowy Still Life in Green and Bruno Sepka's oil of a snowed-in tenement district which he called Man's Houses, raised the exhibition's level of technical competence but did nothing to lighten the atmosphere. Minneapolis' Walker Art Center sent six paintings that demonstrated how diversely students in a progressive art school will advance. They ranged from Reginald Anderson's Figures, a spiky, thin-air abstraction, to Roland Thompson's carefully realistic Culvert. William Chaiken's patchwork Tryst at the Fountain (see cut) was painted at Manhattan's Art Students League, showed the weary sophistication that comes with spending a lot of time in big-city galleries.

All in all the students did not seem to be having much fun. Andover's cross section was grey as the dawn, but like the dawn it might be a preview of brighter things.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.