Arts: At Lyme

As by the elms that line its street, the hills that watch its roofs, Lyme, Conn., is sentineled by artistic good usage, fortressed by aesthetic tradition. Last week in Lyme a plume of goldenrod was seen, which would have informed all but an outsider that an Art exhibit was in progress—for each year Art comes to Lyme with the goldenrod. This year, the exhibition satisfied all demands by being up to the standard of those in the past; to have made it noticeably better would have seemed to the natives a bit vulgar; to have made it worse would have been impossible—for artistic Lyme.

Dean of the coterie is Bruce Crane. He is exhibiting two canvases. Both embody the sort of delicate lyric treatment of wood scenes upon which his reputation rests—scenes having the atmosphere of a hazy, glamorous afternoon in the forest of Broceliande. There are other lyricists also who do very well with the same sort of thing—Frank Vincent DuMond, greeneries; William S. Robinson, mountain laurel in bloom; Guy Wiggins, birch saplings, crumbling walls. All this is the sympathetic rendering of local nature that is characteristic of Lyme exhibits. There are also artists who paint cattle, ballet-dancers, ships. Will Howe Foote's Southcote—Bermuda stands out among the many typical paintings for its imaginative execution. Here and there in the exhibit, one can detect a disturbing hint, a fugitive suggestion of modernism, but such instances are rare and—unLyme-like.