Art: Manhattan Galleries

In the coppery end-of-summer weather in Manhattan last week, suave vendors of art began to prepare their galleries along broad 57th Street and teeming Madison Avenue for the return from Salzburg, Paris, Vienna, London of the patrons by whose trade they live. Old and young art dealers were perking up despite the torpor of the stock market. Julien Levy, the introducer of Surrealist Salvador Dali (TIME, Dec. 14 et ante), pioneer in many a modern artist of fashion, announced the removal of his gallery into more spacious quarters on 57th Street. Meanwhile private and public galleries carried on with the last few weeks of their summer shows, adding here and there a room of new stuff.

¶ Just in time to attract Legionnaires on the morning after their big parade (see p. 12), the Museum of Modern Art hung up a selection of gruesome war etchings by German Otto Dix, who spent four years on the Western Front, and a dynamic painting, Armored Train, by Italian Gino Severini, one of the Italian Futurists who discovered about 1915 that war was both hygienic and beautiful.

¶ The curious reputation of 73-year-old Louis Eilshemius, whose painting was first honored by the National Academy of Design in 1892 and has since passed through various degrees of fantasy toward a vanishing point of artistic merit, received the support of a carefully pruned exhibition at the Kleemann Galleries. Billed as "All of Eilshemius," the show covers the years from 1884 to 1909. Some of Eilshemius' "twilight" paintings and landscapes still looked remarkable to connoisseurs last week, as most of his nudes looked incredibly vapid.

¶ At the neat little gallery of J. B. Neumann, chubby, sage and glowing enthusiast of 30 years' standing for "new" art, art lovers were greeted with the unusual spectacle of an exhibition composed wholly of old masters. They were, advised Dealer Neumann, "choice examples of living art, works of older periods that deserve to survive for their great vitality and imaginative appeal." In a medieval painting of St. Mark by an unknown Austrian artist, visitors could find a cubistic treatment of planes; in a fantasy by the Flemish painter Pietr Huys, Carnival Scene, were strange suspensions of rods and dangling objects like the "mobiles" of U. S. Artist Alexander Calder. Two duelists on skates approach each other with impedimenta as weird as the White Knight's. One of them grins from within a birdcage-topped barrel, while the other, armed with poker & tongs, crouches under the carapace of a sheep-skull. A bored hermit reclining in the background is ostentatiously not interested.