The Best in 50 Years?

Who can pick the "ten best" paintings of any era? Probably nobody, but people have been known to try. For an exhibition which opened this week, Manhattan's Wildenstein Gallery asked the art critics of seven U.S. publications to choose ten outstanding American paintings of the 20th century apiece.

Art Digest, Art News and Magazine of Art leaned heavily to the advance guard; LIFE, the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune stuck to the middle of the road. TIME was comparatively conservative, chose five pictures that had been painted 30 or more years ago.*

Only five painters of the half-century made three or more of the seven lists: Stuart Davis, Lyonel Feininger, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Edward Hopper.

* TIME'S favorites: Thomas Eakins' Mrs. Edith Mahon (1904), George Luks's The Spielers (1905), Winslow Homer's Driftwood (1909), John Sloan's Backyards, Greenwich Village (1914), John Marin's Sun, Isles, and Sea (1921), Edward Hopper's New York Movie (1939), Ben Shahn's Vacant Lot (1939), Marsden Hartley's Mt. Katahdin, Autumn, No. 1 (1940), Charles Burchfield's Coming of Spring (1943), Andrew Wyeth's A Crow Flew By (1950).

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