Paris in Boston

"Art in America is derivative because it is still too young." Thus spoke France's Raoul Dufy in Boston last week. "France," he added, "has lived a long time--eight or nine centuries--and yet art in France, too, was derivative up until the 19th Century . . . American art, like America, must wait and live a while longer."

Meanwhile it was nice having visitors. Dufy, 73, in the U.S. for treatment of his arthritis, had already regained a bit of the nimbleness his knobby hands were famed for, had set to work painting sprightly watercolors and oils of his new surroundings. Dufy's New England looked rosy as his view of U.S. art was dim. He had filled the Charles River with a champagne-fizz of sailboats and bright ripples, turned the boxy Suffolk County courthouse into a castle of air, given Boston Harbor's fishing fleet a carnival atmosphere, set Beacon Hill on its ear and made the Georgian brick halls of Harvard dance (see cut). All in all, his Boston pictures were Parisian as ever.

"There are of course differences between the American scene and the French scene," Dufy admitted, "but they are superficial . . . One may paint the American scene, but a painted landscape is not nature anyway. Art is a creative thing, like music or poetry . . ."

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