Art: Year

(See following supplement)

Last week contemporary historians in their hallowed hour of retrospect could not fail to be struck by the dramatic character of 1937 in the field of art. During the spring and summer, paintings by El Greco and other great works belonging to galleries in Madrid, notably the Prado Museum, were removed under fire to Valencia and in some cases to Paris. While Spanish artists in Spain stubbornly ignored the war if they could, in Paris Spaniard Pablo Picasso found the perfect subject for his new horror-mangled style in a huge mural, The Bombing of Guernica, for the Spanish Government Building of the International Exposition. Meanwhile the choicest exhibition of French masterpieces ever held attracted Paris visitors to the Palais National des Arts. In Munich Reichsführer Adolf Hitler dedicated a new Hall of German Art with a go-minute denunciation of surrealist and abstract painting. In the U.S. an abstract painting, The Yellow Cloth by Cubist Georges Braque, won First Prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition (TIME, Oct. 25).

Against this international background. Art in the U. S. had a less turbulent but no less significant year. All authorities agreed that the wave of public interest in painting which began during Depression rolled on, getting higher. In February the superb exhibition of pictures by Vincent van Gogh, assembled by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art in 1935, closed in Manhattan after being seen by 900,000 people in nine cities, a record for traveling shows in the U. S. surpassed only by Whistler's Mother (TIME, Nov. 14, 1932). In November the all-pervading Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration completed its first two years. Among its accomplishments were a much-publicized renaissance of mural painting, a great work of national scholarship in the Index of American Design,* free art classes for children and adults in about 60 towns and cities, the employment of 5,000 artists. The year was also notable for two great gifts to the public by rich men: the Mellon collection to the U. S. Government and the exceptional Bache collection to the State of New York. Late in the autumn publishers awoke to the fact that no season in many years had been so thickly plummed with instructive, inexpensive books on art.

U. S Painting. As aware of European styles as ever before, U. S. artists last year showed a maturing independence of them. Nineteen thirty-seven opened with the important Surrealist Exhibition at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art and closed with an exhibition of The Eternal City by Peter Blume, whose work has been called "an American form of Surrealism." But the definite character and strength of U. S. painting is nowhere clearer than in the fact that Blume's painting is actually not Surrealist but an original, explicitly symbolic picture designed to say a good deal to the waking, not the subconscious, mind. To many critics the year in U. S. painting was full of striking evidence of this growth of intellectual freedom side by side with esthetic sobriety.