Studies in Scarlet

For all his weekend familiarity with burnt sienna and chrome yellow, Sunday Painter Dwight Eisenhower is an uneasy critic of other people's artistic output--especially when it includes political undertones. Last week at the presidential press conference, Maine Newshen May Craig asked Ike's opinion of the art section of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, which is, somewhat belatedly, being scrutinized by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (34 of the 67 artists represented, the committee charged, "have records of affiliations with Communist fronts and causes"). Ike's answer was rough going.

The American fair in Moscow, said the President, "is a very huge affair, and this furor about the art is ... really a relatively minor sector . . . The art is down in two fairly small rooms and the exhibition is all over two floors." As for the selection of paintings, he admitted a preference for Andrew Wyeth's study of an elderly lady, but refused to quarrel with the jury.* "I have nothing to say about them because I am not an artist . . . I am not now going to be any censor."

One painting, however, was singled out for comment: Jack Levine's controversial Welcome Home, which shows a bloated, translucent, two-star general banqueting with his friends. "It looks," said General Eisenhower, "like a lampoon more than art, as far as I am concerned." Nobody interrupted to invoke the shades of Hogarth, Goya or Daumier, so Ike went on to say that in the future, "I think I might have something to say if we have another exhibition anywhere." Possibly, "there ought to be one or two people" on the Government's selection boards "that, like most of us here, say we are not too certain exactly what art is, but we know what we like and what America likes."

The four-man jury still knew what it liked, snapped back a telegram to the President describing the Moscow offerings as "the broadest, most representative exhibition of American art of the last 30 years ever sent abroad by our Government." And Manhattan Art Dealer Edith

Halpert, who will be curator of the paintings in the Moscow exhibit, huffed: "Some people think the President's paintings aren't so good either. It's like Truman saying modern art resembles ham and eggs."

* A special committee appointed by George V. Allen, director of the U.S. Information Agency: Franklin C. Watk.ins of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Lloyd Goodrich, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Henry Radford Hope, chairman of the Fine Arts Department of Indiana University; and Sculptor Theodore Roszak of Sarah Lawrence College.

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