1944: Painting And Sculpture

Art and the War.

The fate of the art treasures and historic monuments of Europe has been the most vital interest of the art world during 1944. Preliminary reports on the European situation have come from newspaper correspondents, from the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives officers attached to the various armies, and from the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas. While the destruction of the art heritage of Europe has been appalling, it is nonetheless remarkable how much these losses have been reduced by the intelligent policy of the Allied armies. General Eisenhower's order of Dec. 29, 1943, to all Allied commanders in Italy regarding the protection of historic monuments was made public by President Roosevelt on Feb. 16, 1944, following the destruction by the American Fifth Army because of military necessity, of the Abbey of Monte Cassino southeast of Rome. General Eisenhower said: "Today we are fighting in a country which has contributed a great deal to our cultural inheritance, a country rich in monuments.... We are bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows. If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men's lives count infinitely more and the buildings must go. But the choice is not always so clear-cut as that. In many cases the monuments can be spared without any detriment to operational needs...
It is a responsibility of higher commanders to determine through AMG officers the locations of historical monuments, whether they be immediately ahead of our front lines or in areas occupied by us. This information, passed to lower echelons through normal channels, places the responsibility on all commanders of complying with the spirit of this letter."

These orders were carried out in all European war theaters by Allied commanders in the field and by Civil Affairs officers attached to Allied headquarters. They were the result of a plan worked out through the Army's initiative by such groups as the Harvard Group of American Defense which was asked by the Army as early as December 1942 to list sites of artistic and historic importance in the Mediterranean area. The lists made at Harvard became the basis of an extensive mapping of Europe, begun in 1943 by the Committee for the Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas, set up by the American Council of Learned Societies. Under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation this Committee was enlarged in June 1943 to include museum heads, teachers of art history, archeologists, archivists and librarians. Two months later President Roosevelt set up his Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas under the chairmanship of Justice Roberts, including in its membership many of the committee members mentioned above. Through the activities of these various groups the location of every historic monument, art gallery or museum, library or archive in the war theaters was clearly mapped so that these areas might be avoided and protected. Many historic sites were saved through brilliant artillery direction and precision bombing guided by these maps. Advisers on Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives were sent into the field to aid in the salvage of monuments and to enlist the help of local experts and custodians wherever they can be found in the war areas. The same care will be exercised for the preservation of monuments within Germany.

Reports from Europe.

In spite of these efforts the damage in many areas has been severe and in some such as Florence and Pisa, Rouen and Caen, it is tragic and irreparable. In October 1944 the Office of War Information issued a report based on information secured by Francis Henry Taylor of the President's Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas. The report indicates that, proportionately, England has suffered more loss in the cultural field than either France or Italy. London has taken more battering from the air than any other European capital, with the exception of Warsaw and possibly Berlin. Some 4,000 historic churches in England have been damaged and 2,800 of them destroyed beyond repair. Damage to museums, libraries, and universities has been widespread, not only in London, but throughout England and in Scotland. Exeter Cathedral, one of the finest examples of Middle Gothic architecture, was severely damaged. Canterbury and Wells to a lesser extent. In London the churches of Sir Christopher Wren, rebuilt by him after the Great Fire of 1666, have been damaged and many of them destroyed. Hundreds of other historic buildings in England have been lost.

In France the section of Normandy around Calais, Cherbourg and Rouen has been devastated, although a few of the famous buildings such as Bayeux Cathedral and the two great abbeys built by William the Conqueror at Caen have escaped serious damage. Rouen Cathedral was very severely hurt and the town has suffered much. At Chartres, the damage to the Cathedral, which is situated only 500 metres from one of the great airfields of France which was bombed repeatedly by the Allies, was limited to the old South tower, and some surface damage from snipers' bullets during the liberation. Mont St. Michel, in the area of St. Malo where the fighting was heavy, was unharmed. Paris was practically untouched. The Luxembourg Palace, which became a military objective when Goering made it the headquarters of the Luftwaffe, was the only historic monument wrecked. The state art collections from the Louvre and other museums of France were stored in 1939 in 70 depositories, chiefly the cellars of chateaux south of the Loire River. It appears that during the first two years of occupation these depositories were protected by the Nazis and as a whole did not suffer looting. During the latter part of the period of occupation increasing pressure was put upon French museum officials to release important works of art for "cultural exchange" with Germany. Jacques Jaujard, director of the National Museums of France, is reported to have been clever and courageous in stalling Nazi attempts to exchange minor German works for important French ones. The most notorious case of looting in France was that of the Ghent altarpiece, The Adoration of the Lamb by the brothers Van Eyck, one of the most famous paintings in the world, which had been sent to the Louvre for safekeeping by the Belgian government. This painting was removed from its depository at Aix-en-Provence on an order signed by Abel Bonnard, Vichy Minister of Education, and presented to Hermann Goering as a birthday gift. This theft was violently protested by Jacques Jaujard. The protest brought about Jaujard's dismissal from his post, whereupon the entire staffs of all the French museums resigned in a body, forcing Vichy to reinstate Jaujard. Another prized art treasure, the Bayeux Tapestry, was about to be shipped to Germany when the Allied armies entered Paris. Early in the war this 11th century work, depicting the conquest of England by William the Conqueror, had been stored in the Chateau de Sourches near Rennes. The Vichy government gave the Nazis permission to remove the tapestry and it had been taken to Paris for shipment to Germany. Reports from Allied headquarters in France indicate that while there had been comparatively little looting of French national art treasures, private collections, and especially those owned by Jews, had fared badly. Many of these had either been confiscated or acquired by fictitious sale and placed in the Jeu de Paume Museum where agents of Hitler, Himmler, and Goering (mostly leading German art scholars) came to select the most valuable items.

The record of destruction in Italy is one of irreparable loss to the world. Many of the most beautiful buildings which have come down to us from the Medieval and Renaissance periods no longer exist. Florence and Pisa suffered the most tragic and extensive damage. At Florence on Aug. 4 the Germans destroyed the Arno bridges and the surrounding medieval palaces with a violence and thoroughness that went far beyond military necessity. The only bridge which was spared was the Ponte Vecchio with its old craftsmen's shops, but whole streets along the river at both ends of the Ponte Vecchio were destroyed instead, and 13th and 14th century houses with their irreplaceable furnishings and libraries were reduced to rubble. Among the most tragic losses were those of the Ponte di Santa Trinità, built in 1569, of which nothing remained except two pylons; and the Palazzo di Parte Guelfa, a 14th century structure decorated by Brunelleschi and Vasari. Some ancient manuscripts, books and objects of art, especially those of the Società Colombaria, have been found in the rubble, and fragments of the sculptural ornament of the Santa Trinità Bridge have been recovered from the Arno.

In 1942 Florence's great treasures of Renaissance painting and sculpture were gathered from museums and palaces and stored throughout the Tuscan countryside in the cellars of villas, castles and convents. All but two of these depositories known to the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Commission are now in Allied hands. Reports indicate that most of these works of art are safe; but it appears that at least two of the Tuscan depositories were looted by the Germans of many cases of paintings and sculptures. Possibly as many as 500 to 600 works of art are missing, famous among them being Raphael's Veiled Woman, Botticelli's Minerva and the Centaur, Michelangelo's Bacchus, and Donatello's St. George. The great paintings by Uccello from Santa Maria Novella have been reported somewhat damaged, but the Medici Chapel sculptures by Michelangelo and famous works by Donatello, Andrea Pisano and Luca della Robbia, stored in the same depository, are reported safe.

The picturesque medieval city of Pisa suffered greater destruction than any of the other important Tuscan cities. Pisa, which was a veritable gold mine of art treasures scattered through every part of the city, was battered in many Allied raids and fought over by land armies from July 24 to September 3, 1944. It is virtually in ruins. Hundreds of buildings which had escaped bombs and shells were mined by the Germans. In the Campo Santo, which is part of that famous group of buildings including the Leaning Tower, cathedral and baptistry, the world of culture has suffered one of the greatest losses of the war. This building contains precious fresco paintings by Benozzo Gozzoli and the great masterpiece, the Triumph of Death fresco ascribed to Andrea Orcagna and painted about 1350. Though ravaged sections of these paintings still remain, they are damaged beyond repair. The destruction took place at a time when the American Fifth Army on the south bank of the Arno faced the Germans on the north bank. Four shells from an American gun hit the roof of the Campo Santo and fired it, and melted lead and blazing timbers fell all night on the fresco paintings and on the collections of Etruscan, Roman and Medieval sculpture within the building. Even more dreadful damage to the frescoes, however, occurred in the weeks that followed when the strong Italian sun beat down upon what remained of the paintings and robbed them of their color. When the Fifth Army finally captured the north side of Pisa, immediate steps were taken to roof over the building and to protect and salvage what remained of the Campo Santo.

Many towns on the way to Rome, especially Benevento with its great Romanesque church, were terribly hurt. St. Thomas' Cathedral in Ortona was deliberately blown up by the Germans. Certain of the Italian hill towns were miraculously saved. Assisi was one of these. In Perugia the Germans mined the Renaissance bridges but the rest of the town escaped serious damage. At Orvieto the priceless Last Judgment frescoes by Signorelli were intact; and at Arezzo the cathedral church with its great frescoes by Piero della Francesca was unharmed, in spite of bomb damage in the town. Siena was saved any but minor losses. The Germans had mined Siena before withdrawing, but the plan was found and the mines removed in time; and the French general whose troops took the city spared it from artillery fire. San Gimignano was wantonly shelled by the Germans after their withdrawal and there was considerable damage there. The frescoes by Barna da Siena in the Collegiata were hit, but the Ghirlandaio and Benozzo Gozzoli frescoes were not touched; the sculptures by Benedetto da Maiano and Jacopo della Quercia also escaped damage. At Viterbo and Pienza terrible damage was done to churches and other historic buildings.

Except for minor damage to the Church of San Lorenzo, Rome escaped. Great numbers of art treasures from the museums of Venice, Naples, Milan, Urbino and other Italian cities were sent for safekeeping to the Vatican. The presence in Rome of these works of art from various parts of Italy, late in the year, led to an important exhibition, held in response to the requests of Allied troops to be allowed to visit the art galleries in Rome. This special exhibition was organized at the Palazzo Venezia by the Division of Fine Arts of the Allied Military Government. Similar exhibitions for the Allied troops are being planned in Florence and Siena. There is little direct evidence, but there appears to have been extensive German theft of works of art from the collections of the great Italian galleries. German propaganda made much of the fact that the cases containing masterpieces from the Naples National Gallery, which had been stored in the Abbey of Monte Cassino, were turned over to the Vatican by the Germans for safekeeping before the Allied bombings. It was found, however, that 15 of these cases never arrived at the Vatican, and that others had been opened and important contents removed. Among the works of art which disappeared in this way were Titian's Danae and another Titian, a Raphael, a Claude Lorrain and a famous Breughel, The Blind Leading the Blind, all from Naples. A very great loss was the burning of the National Library at Naples. Classical remains in Italy and Sicily suffered less damage than was expected, though at Pompeii the new excavations were seriously hurt. In Greece the Germans carried out extensive archeological excavations.

There have been no official reports on the fate of the art of the Low Countries. The director of the Belgian Royal Museum was quoted as believing, at the time of his return to Belgium after its liberation, that Belgian art collections had suffered no more serious loss than had those of France. It is known, however, that the Germans have stolen three of Belgium's greatest treasures, the Virgin and Child by Michelangelo from Bruges, the Louvain altarpiece by Roger van der Weyden, and the Ghent altarpiece by the van Eycks, mentioned above. A chalk cave near Maastricht, The Netherlands has been revealed as the depository for a large number of masterpieces from the great museums of Holland. The great Isenheim altarpiece by Matthias Gruenewald from the Colmar Museum, which was thought looted, was found in a castle near Colmar by an American officer. With the liberation of Paris the American art world received news of the many renowned French artists who with the rest of Paris had been cut off during the four years of German occupation. Pablo Picasso, greatest living figure in the arts, has been prominent in these news stories, and his reputation has been further enhanced by his record during the occupation. In a report on Picasso Alfred H. Barr, Jr., of the Museum of Modern Art, says: "... his position in the Resistance Movement is of unique importance. Though not a Frenchman he stayed in Paris, when a good many leading French artists spent the war working quietly in the provinces, left the country entirely ... or in a few shameful cases remained to collaborate with the Germans. Picasso's presence must have disquieted the Germans for he was conspicuously anathema to Hitler. For many years he had been in Nazi eyes the most formidable master of degenerate art ...; he was said to have Jewish blood; in his Dreams and Lies of Franco he had savagely lampooned Hitler's faithful Spanish ally; he had accepted an official appointment, the directorship of the Prado, from the Spanish Republican government, the first victim of the Axis; and he had painted Guernica. Yet he returned to Paris after the summer of 1940 and lived there for four precarious years under German rule without recantation or compromise and protected only by his greatness as an artist.... Oct. 6 the Salon d'Automne opened. Ordinarily this is the most important of the big annual Paris exhibitions. But the Salon d'Automne of 1944 was uniquely significant. Held just six weeks after Aug. 25, it became the Salon de la Libération, the first great public manifestation of painting in France after four years of German domination. Though organized and controlled by French artists the place of honor was given to the Spaniard, Picasso, who alone had the privilege of a large one-man show — 74 paintings and five pieces of sculpture, all of them done since the occupation of 1940. No greater tribute could be paid the artist who had been for so long a symbol of the Resistance." Other prominent exhibitors in the Salon were Bonnard, Braque, Matisse, Dufy and Lhote; excluded were the distinguished French artists known as "collaborators": Vlaminck, Derain, Friesz, Segonzac and Despiau. Two days after the exhibition opened a demonstration against Picasso's paintings took place in which 15 of his works were torn from the walls. The reasons are not known but it is thought that it may have been done by a group of reactionary young art students. No damage was done. Rouault, Lurcat and other well-known men have carried on in Paris and worked hard. Matisse, who is over 75 years old, is very ill near Nice, but he continues to paint while lying in bed. Pierre Bonnard, 77 years old and living in Cannes, is painting with great vigor and has become the spiritual leader of a younger generation of painters whose work has developed since 1940. Among them are Leon Gischia, Francis Tailleux, Georges Singier, Talcoat, André Fougeron, Robin, and Maurice Estève, and work by some of them has been seen in a color portfolio published during the occupation by Editions du Chêne. Three other portfolios in the series were devoted to the wartime paintings of Picasso, Bonnard and Matisse. number of world-renowned artists died in 1944. Aristide Maillol, possibly the greatest of 20th century sculptors, was killed at the age of 82 in a motor accident near his home at Banyuls, France. Edvard Munch, the great Norwegian forerunner of 20th century Expressionism, died at 80 in Norway. Vassily Kandinsky, Russian painter and theorist, died in Paris at the age of 77. Piet Mondrian, painter of pure abstraction and one of the pioneer spirits of 20th century art, who had lived in New York since 1940, died in New York at 72. The death of Chaim Soutine in France in 1943 was confirmed this year; Maurice Denis also died in 1943. most important activity undertaken by American museums in 1944 concerned the return of major works of art from the storage places in which they had been secreted against possible damage by bombing. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York made public the fact that its most valuable paintings had been stored at Whitemarsh Hall, Whitemarsh, Pa. The gradual return of these works of art to the Metropolitan was begun in the early spring and the painting galleries of the museum, completely redecorated, were opened to the public in May. At this time the Metropolitan also installed the Jules S. Bache collection. Early in 1944 announcement was made that the trustees of the Bache Foundation planned to make the Metropolitan the permanent home of this noted art collection. The National Gallery of Art in Washington also began to return to its walls major paintings from the Mellon and Kress collections which had been stored at the start of the war in Biltmore House, Biltmore, N. C. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, New York's Morgan Library, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York likewise removed their most valued possessions from war storage and placed them again on exhibition. Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which in 1943 became a part of the Metropolitan Museum by action of the trustees of both institutions, reopened its building in September with the announcement of a program of exhibitions carrying through the season until June 1945. Announcement was made in 1944 that the Museum of Costume Art, founded in New York in 1937 by the late Irene Lewisohn, had been incorporated into the Metropolitan Museum. The collection of the Museum of Costume Art, comprising some 7,000 items, will eventually be installed in the Metropolitan with its own collections of dress and textiles. The American Museum of Natural History completed an elaborate reorganization of its hall of Mexican and Central-American Archeology. This new installation is most welcome not only to archeologists but to art lovers, since this Pre-Columbian collection contains some superb examples of Mayan and Aztec sculpture, undoubtedly one of the great artistic traditions of the world. The Museum of Modern Art in New York established a Department of Manual Industry, which will parallel the museum's Department of Industrial Design established in 1940 to cover the field of mass-produced objects. The National Gallery of Art in Washington established an Inter-American Office, created by a grant-in-aid from the Department of State, to act as the Government's official clearing-house for the exchange of information concerning art activities in the American Republics. The Museum of Non-Objective Art in New York announced that it would erect a building to be designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Museum of Modern Art announced that, during the fiscal year July 1, 1943-June 30, 1944, it had circulated 131 exhibitions to 622 institutions in 235 cities. It also prepared at the request of U.S. Government agencies two exhibitions for London, one for Sydney, Australia, one for Cairo, one for Stockholm, and two for South America. Museums throughout the country have been active in using their resources to further the war effort. The Museums Council of New York City had set up in 1943 a Committee on Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation, composed of Richard F. Bach of the Metropolitan Museum, Charles Russell of the American Museum of Natural History, and James T. Soby of the Museum of Modern Art, to study the methods by which museums can assist, by extra-mural and intra-mural work, in the greatly increasing activity in the field of occupational therapy. American museums have also cooperated very extensively with the Arts and Skills Unit of the American Red Cross, which was organized in 1942 to supply craftsmen and artists on a volunteer basis to act as instructors in therapy for recreational purposes in military hospitals. The museums, particularly in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, have helped supply artist personnel for the Arts and Skills Unit, and have provided advisory committees, meeting rooms, and art materials; and, as in the case of the Chicago Art Institute, have established recreational therapy centers in the hospitals. The Museum of Modern Art set up in 1944 a War Veterans' Art Center, providing day and evening classes in the arts and crafts for recreational and pre-vocational training. Certain museums have been able to supply special information and services for war use. The American Museum of Natural History has written sections of military handbooks dealing with the natives and geography in war areas, and has made a great many portable exhibits for the Army dealing with racial identification. The Metropolitan Museum has supplied thousands of color reproductions and prints to hospitals. Many museums have presented shows dealing with the arts in therapy, to inform the public of work in this field. museums maintained active and varied exhibition programs in spite of transportation problems and the difficulty of obtaining loans of works of art. In the old-master field there were no loan exhibitions of major importance. Apart from new installations in large Eastern museums of their masterpieces brought back from war storage, the most important exhibition of the art of the past held during 1944 was that of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts collection of Chinese painting, shown as a whole for the first time. This collection was formed from about 1890 on under the scholarly direction of the late Ernest Fenellosa and the late Denman Ross, and ranks as one of the most important in the Asiatic field. The Baltimore Museum of Art organized an exhibition of unusual interest, which was also shown at the St. Louis City Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Art. This comprised the works available in American collections by three late Baroque masters, Strozzi, Crespi and Piazzetta. The Art Institute of Chicago assembled a large group of paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and other objects of art dating from Assyrian to modern times, under the banner Art of the United Nations. Toledo's Museum of Art showed 16 old masters from the celebrated Cook collection of England, which had been sent to the United States for safe storage during the war. Museum of Modern Art celebrated its 15th anniversary with an exhibition of broad scope covering every phase of this museum's interest: the art of the late 19th and 20th centuries in Europe and America, modern architecture, industrial design, photography, films and theatre design. This museum also arranged an exhibition of Modern Drawings, bringing together over 300 excellent examples from the 19th and 20th centuries. In San Francisco the California Palace of the Legion of Honor marked its 20th anniversary with a Renoir exhibition, Sculpture by Rodin was assembled at the Columbus (Ohio) Gallery of Fine Arts. The Philadelphia Museum placed on exhibition an extended loan of some 300 items from the collection of Alfred Stieglitz, dean of American photographers. These paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and fine photographs, acquired over a long period, serve to sum up the career and ideas of a man who has had great influence in the American art world. The Cincinnati Art Museum attempted to reassemble the works of art which made up the celebrated Armory Show of 1913, the most famous exhibition of modern art ever held in America. While many works from the Armory Show are still well-known, a large number of them could not be traced. Both the Dayton (Ohio) Art Institute and the Boston Institute of Modern Art organized exhibitions on the theme of Religious Art Today. art of the 19th century received considerable attention in museum exhibitions. The Philadelphia Museum of Art did honor to that city's most distinguished painter, Thomas Eakins, in a large show marking the centennial of his birth. The National Gallery of Art held a loan show called American Battle Art in which paintings and drawings of American war subjects from the Revolution to World War I were assembled for the first time. This was later shown in part at the Museum of Modern Art. A correlated exhibition of prints, maps and political cartoons was held at the Library of Congress. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston organized an exhibition, largely of 19th century work, around the theme Sport in American Art. Some 65 of Winslow Homer's less familiar oils and watercolors were assembled at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, as a sequel to the larger Homer exhibition there in 1936. The Philadelphia Art Alliance showed the work of the 19th century American painter, Eastman Johnson. art had several notable showings in the United States in 1944. The Art Institute of Chicago brought to this country a comprehensive exhibition, organized in 1943 by the Mexican government, of the work of José Guadelupe Posada (1852-1913), the great printmaker to the Mexican people and forerunner of Mexico's revolutionary art. Following the showing in Chicago, this exhibition was seen at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Another, completely different forerunner of the modern Mexican school, José María Velasco (1840-1912), was the subject of a comprehensive exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum, which was also later shown at Brooklyn. Velasco was the outstanding landscape painter of the 19th century in Mexico but his work has been neglected here. At the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 a large landscape by Velasco won first prize, and at the Paris World's Fair of 1889 he showed 68 paintings. Modern painting in Cuba, where very lively developments are taking place in the arts, was introduced in the United States by the Museum of Modern Art in a showing in New York, followed by a tour of museums in other cities. leading American painters were given comprehensive one-man retrospectives in museums: at the Museum of Modern Art, the late Marsden Hartley, who developed a personal kind of expressionism in his paintings of the sea coast and mountains of his native Maine; and Lyonel Feininger, who lived abroad for nearly 50 years, and who expressed his romantic love for the sea and for the old Gothic towns and churches of Germany in an art stemming mainly from cubism. The Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, N. Y., arranged the most comprehensive showing yet seen of Charles Burchfield's paintings with their nostalgic interpretation of the American scene. An outstanding survey of American art in the 19th and 20th centuries was placed on exhibition by the Newark (N. J.) Museum to celebrate its 35th anniversary. All of the 275 paintings and sculptures shown belong to its own collection. The Metropolitan Museum gave exhibition space to a contemporary American show, entitled Portrait of America (see Artists and American Business). The Detroit Institute of Arts chose 21 artists for an exhibition called Advance Trends in Contemporary American Art. One hundred American artists contributed portraits of one man, the painter Abraham Walkowitz, to an exhibition held at the Brooklyn Museum. American museums continued to hold their annuals of contemporary American art, although wartime shipping problems have transformed them from jury shows to "invitation" shows. Notable among the large annuals in 1944 were those at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Dallas Art Museum, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. the field of graphic arts, the Posada show at Chicago and the exhibition Hayter and Studio 17 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York were the major museum presentations. Studio 17 was started in Paris in 1927 by a young Englishman, Stanley William Hayter, whose brilliant technical experimentation and revival of the neglected art of line engraving brought many distinguished artists to his workshop. During 13 years in Paris such men as Chagall, Picasso, Lipchitz, Miro, Ernst and Calder worked with Hayter in some of the most vital researches in 20th century graphic art. In 1940 Studio 17 was transplanted to the New School for Social Research in New York, where many well-known American artists have been working with Hayter, along with an interesting group of younger talents. H. Kress further enriched the collection of the National Gallery in Washington by a gift of 71 Italian Renaissance paintings and 26 pieces of sculpture. Included in the group are Raphael's Bindo Altoviti; St. John in the Desert by Domenico Veneziano; a rare painting, Circe and Her Lovers in a Landscape (1514) by Dosso Dossi; and works by Botticelli, Filippino Lippi and Giovanni Bellini. (See also Sculpture, below.) Mr. Kress also gave the National Gallery nine important French paintings of the 18th century, including the great Watteau Italian Comedians, and works by Fragonard, Boucher, Drouais and others. The Metropolitan Museum has added to its painting galleries the noted Bache collection of old masters, which is to become the permanent property of the museum. Outstanding acquisitions made by the Metropolitan were Rubens' Atalanta and Meleager; and an English picture of exceptional quality, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, and Sir John Harrington, painted by an unknown master in 1603. The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery in Kansas City added to its collection an important Madonna and Child Enthroned by Memling painted about 1450-60. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts acquired an early Claude Lorrain, The Mill, of 1631; and a Rubens landscape. The Frick Collection in New York acquired an outstanding portrait by Goya, The Duke of Osuna; an important Gothic bronze (see Sculpture, below); and works by Constable, Rembrandt, Reynolds and Greuze. Other old masters which were acquired during the year were: a Corneille de Lyon and a Hobbema from the Morgan collection, by the John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis; the Elizabeth Prentiss collection of over 130 items, including Lancret's Declaration of Love and paintings by French, Italian and English masters, by the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Rubens Tribute Money, by the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco; Jacques Louis David's Portrait of Pierre Desmaison, by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, N. Y.; a Veronese, Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, a Rubens, and a Jacob Cornelisz, by the Detroit Institute of Arts; paintings by the Baroque masters, Strozzi and Crespi, by the City Art Museum of St. Louis, a Madonna and Child by Francesco Pesellino, by the Toledo Museum of Art, a Cosimo Tura and a Jacopo Bellini, by the San Diego Gallery of Fine Arts; the Balch collection including works by Petrus Christus, Terborch, Pieter de Hooch, and other Dutch and Flemish masters, by the Los Angeles County Museum; and the Crozier collection of Chinese art, by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. American 19th century paintings entering museum collections were Thomas Eakins' The Dean's Roll Call, for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; two examples by Washington Allston, for the Detroit Institute of Arts; Winslow Homer's Girl with Lobster, for the Cleveland Museum of Art; two paintings by George Caleb Bingham, The County Election and The Jolly Flatboatmen, for the City Art Museum of St. Louis; examples by Doughty, Whittredge, Bierstadt and others, for the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass.; and works by Gilbert Stuart, Rembrandt Peale, Inness, and Robert L. Newman, for the Virginia Museum, Richmond. In the French 19th century field Cleveland got Gauguin's L'Appel; the Joslyn Memorial in Omaha, Neb., Renoir's Two Young Girls at the Piano, of 1883; the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, a Renoir landscape; the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design, examples by Géricault, Manet and Cézanne; the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, a Vuillard, and the Springfield (Mass.) Museum of Fine Arts, a Monet and a Carrière. The National Gallery received from Chester Dale two paintings by George Bellows, his best (though not his most famous) prize fight, Both Members of This Club, and his portrait of Mrs. Dale. of the great collections of 20th century art, formed over a quarter of a century by the poet and scholar, Walter Conrad Arensberg of Hollywood, Calif., will pass to the University of California in Los Angeles. This collection of over 1,200 items boasts fine examples by the leaders of contemporary European art, as well as many Americans, and a recently added group of Pre-Columbian sculptures from Central America, including the famous Stone of Chiapas. Especially notable is the group of 15 sculptures by Brancusi, and the celebrated "shocker" of the Armory Show of 1913, the Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp. The University will build a modern museum to house the Arensberg collection after the war. The Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the City Art Museum of St. Louis, and others made acquisitions in 20th century European art. Contemporary American art offered the most fertile field for museum acquisition this year. Among institutions which added extensively to their American collections were the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Newark Museum; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Baltimore Art Museum; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond; and the New Britain (Conn.) Institute. Artists whose work was acquired by these institutions include Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, Lyonel Feininger, Karl Zerbe, George Bellows, Charles Burchfield, Charles Sheeler, Milton Avery, Peppino Mangravite, Walter Stuempfig, Jack Levine, William Gropper, Ben Shahn, Edward Hopper, Franklin Watkins, Stuart Davis, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, and Alexander Calder. foregoing lists are far from complete but give an indication of the broad scope of American museum acquisitions during this war year. In England museums also enriched their collections in spite of the war. The Tate Gallery in London toward the end of the year held an exhibition of nearly 100 of its wartime acquisitions, the second such exhibition since the outbreak of war. The National Gallery in London purchased four panels by Giovanni di Paolo from the J. P. Morgan collection in England. The Glasgow Art Gallery received the gift of the great Burrell Collection, consisting of some 4,000 items and including Degas' Portrait of Duranty and Daumier's Le Meunier, Son Fils et L'Ane. Constable's Vale of Dedham was purchased from the Neeld Collection for the National Gallery of Scotland for £20,000. America entered the war the activities of artist societies have been united in one organization known as Artists for Victory, Inc. In 1944 Artists for Victory organized a "good will" exhibition of contemporary American art to be sent to England and Scotland. It opened at the National Academy in Edinburgh, where it had 4,000 visitors in the first two days. London's Central Institute of Art and Design in turn sent to the United States an exhibition of contemporary British art, which was shown first at the National Academy in New York and then started a tour. Through the U.S. Office of War Information and the War Artists' Advisory Committee of Britain, exhibitions of war paintings by artists of the two countries were exchanged. To date, the work produced by British artists under the sponsorship of the War, Navy and Air Ministries seems far superior as artistic expression to the more reportorial work of the American artist-correspondents. New York artist societies which held their annual membership exhibitions in 1944 were the National Academy, the Society of Independent Artists, the Sculptors' Guild, An American Group and the American Abstract Artists. increasingly intelligent and successful use of art in American advertising has been an interesting development of the last two or three years. In 1944 such firms as Standard Oil, Abbott Laboratories, American Locomotive, Shell Oil, Container Corporation of America and others have given a great many commissions to artists well-known in the museum world. magazine continued to send artist-correspondents into battle areas in Europe and the East to record the war for its pages. Of the many artists so employed for Life, the 30-year-old David Fredenthal produced by all odds the most vital work of the year. Fortune magazine, Colliers and others also gave commissions to artists. Standard Oil of New Jersey commissioned four painters, Adolf Dehn, David Fredenthal, Reginald Marsh and Millard Sheets, to paint pictures illustrating the role played by oil in the war. These were exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum. The Metropolitan Museum showed Naval Aviation in the Pacific, a group of paintings by seven artists commissioned by the Abbott Laboratories in 1943 and donated to the Navy. Pepsi-Cola Company achieved prominence in art circles this year by inaugurating a nation-wide competition for 12 paintings to be reproduced in color on the pages of a calendar which they will issue in 500,000 copies for free distribution. Pepsi-Cola offered $11,000 in prizes and Artists for Victory, Inc. sponsored and ran the competition. Some 3,000 American artists responded with 5,000 submissions of paintings. A jury of artists selected 150 paintings from these for an exhibition called Portrait of America at the Metropolitan Museum, and a separate jury selected the 12 prize-winners for the calendar. The winners of these handsome prizes were Waldo Peirce, Philip Evergood, Louis Bosa, Joseph de Martini ($2,500 to $1,000), and Vincent Spagna, Sol Wilson, Arthur Osver, Lucille Corcos, Xavier Gonzales, Louis Guglielmi, Stuart Davis and Philip Reisman ($500 each). The first four prize-winning pictures, and later 14 other pictures, were purchased by the Pepsi-Cola Company for its permanent collection of American art. A total of $34,535 worth of pictures, which includes the Company's purchases, was sold during the showing at the Metropolitan. The exhibition will tour the museums of Springfield, Mass., Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas and Kansas City. The Pepsi-Cola Company, following up the publicity it received as an art patron, has announced even bigger plans for next year's Portrait of America competition. has been aroused also in the collection of 20th century American art which has been formed during 1944 by the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The collection now numbers 116 paintings and more are to be added. It will be shown early in 1945 at the Art Institute of Chicago and will tour other museums. most important of these presentations during the year was that of the paintings and drawings of the great French Romantic, Eugène Delacroix. This was shown in New York. No comparable exhibition of Delacroix' work has been held in the United States. American painting of the 19th century enjoyed a great revival of interest and was shown repeatedly in New York galleries and purchased by museums and private collectors. Forgotten paintings are being brought to light and many neglected reputations have become the object of research, all of which will be of genuine value in rounding out and strengthening the American tradition in the arts. A group of paintings by Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910), shown by a dealer, were of interest in this connection. Among other exhibitions of note in dealers' galleries were Five Centuries of Ballet, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, The Blue Four, Four Hundred Years of French Drawings, Thomas Eakins, and The Imagery of Chess, all held in New York; The Peales of Philadelphia, held in a Philadelphia gallery; and Contemporary Negro Art, organized by a Washington, D. C. gallery and shown also at the Baltimore Museum and Hampton Institute. work of the following modern European painters was shown in one-man exhibitions in New York: Hans Arp, Marc Chagall,* Raoul Dufy, James Ensor, Max Ernst,* Juan Gris,* Jean Hélion,* Fernand Léger,* André Masson,* Edvard Munch, Chaim Soutine and John Tunnard. All except Gris, Munch and Soutine are living; those starred (*) are at present living in the United States. The usual large number of American exhibitors crowded the dealers' galleries in New York with one-man showings, among them some interesting new-comers. Most successful shows were those of John Atherton, Milton Avery, William Baziotes, Louis Bouché, David Burliuk, Arthur B. Carles, Nicolai Cikovsky, Julio de Diego, Arthur G. Dove, Philip Evergood, Lyonel Feininger, Ernest Fiene, David Fredenthal, William Gropper, Morris Hirshfield, Hans Hofmann, Carl Holty, Walter Houmère, Peter Hurd, Frank Kleinholz, Karl Knaths, Walt Kuhn, Peppino Mangravite, Jan Matulka, George L. K. Morris, Robert Motherwell, Georgia O'Keeffe, Waldo Peirce, I. Rice Pereira, Horace Pippin, Hobson Pittman, Henry Varnum Poor, Ben Shahn, Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, Harold Sterner, Byron Thomas, Mark Tobey, Albert Urban and Max Weber. Noteworthy among Latin-American exhibitors in the galleries were Mario Carreño and Wilfredo Lam (Cuba), Maria (Brazil) and Carlos Merida (Mexico).of the most ambitious sculptures of our times reached completion in New York in 1944. This is the great Prometheus which the Brazilian Government commissioned of the distinguished French-Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, who has been living and working in the United States since 1941. The sculpture represents Prometheus struggling with the vulture, and it will decorate an immense exterior wall of the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro, a building designed by Oscar Niemeyer which has been called the most advanced public architecture in the world. Lipchitz worked out the conception in a model seven feet high, then cast it in plaster for shipment to Brazil, where, under his supervision, it will be enlarged to 20 feet and cast in bronze. general there was little activity in the field of sculpture in the United States, and a notable absence of important private commissions, government-sponsored decoration of public buildings, and large museum exhibitions. That American sculptors continued to work, however, was proved by the usual number of one-man exhibitions held in dealers' galleries during 1944. The exhibitors in New York were Alexander Archipenko, Alexander Calder, Mary Callery, Rhys Caparn, José de Creeft, Wharton Esherick, Alfeo Faggi, Peter Grippe, David Hare, Maria, Louise Nevelson, John Rood, Sally Ryan, Hélène Sardeau, Mitzi Solomon, Turku Trajan, Nat Werner, and Ossip Zadkine.
only large sculpture exhibitions were the Whitney Museum's annual event, in which chiefly New York sculptors were represented. The Sculptors' Guild, which has a membership made up almost entirely of New Yorkers, also held its annual exhibition, considerably smaller than in previous years. splendid group of 26 Italian Renaissance sculptures, with works by Donatello, Verrocchio, Ghiberti, Jacopo della Quercia, Benedetto da Maiano, Antonio Rossellino, Pollaiuolo, Desiderio and others, was included in the impressive collection of Italian art given to the National Gallery in Washington this year by Samuel H. Kress. Two exceedingly rare Greek marble sculptures of the late 4th or early 3rd century BC and showing the influence of Praxiteles were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most important single sculpture acquisition made this year was the Frick Collection's purchase of the late 15th century Gothic bronze known as L'Ange de Lude by Jean Barbet de Lyon, from the J. P. Morgan collection. Until the time of the French Revolution this sculpture formed a pinnacle of the Ste.-Chapelle in Paris. Important modern sculpture by Archipenko, Brancusi, Calder, Despiau and Lipchitz was added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The Arensberg collection, which has been given to the University of California in Los Angeles, is rich in sculpture, both modern and ancient (see Museum Acquisitions, above). year 1944 was a big one in New York galleries. The auction firm of Parke-Bernet reported at the end of June 1944 an unprecedented total of $6,156,632 for the year's sales; this nearly doubled the total for the preceding year, which in turn was the second highest in 10 years past. Gimbel Brothers announced that the combined sales of the Hearst collection and the Kende auction galleries had totalled $4,100,000. Prices in general showed an increase of 30 per cent to 50 per cent over the season before. Highest price paid for a painting at auction was $127,000 for the Frans Hals Merry Lute Player from the John R. Thompson collection. The dealers' art galleries reported a very lively season with many new collectors buying.
stir was caused by the decision of three prominent museums to sell at auction certain works of art from their collections in order to raise funds for future purchases. The museums which carried through this plan were the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an unnamed "midwestern educational institution" and the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, N. Y. (The M. H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco had the year before sold unneeded items from its collection and purchased a Rubens with the proceeds; in the past several large museums have disposed of works which were outmoded or which duplicated others in its collection.) The sale held by the Museum of Modern Art included works by Cézanne, Seurat, Matisse, Derain, Despiau; the "midwestern institution" sold chiefly works of the French Impressionists. The Albright Gallery was bitterly blamed in the press for selling at a fraction of their former value certain unfashionable pictures by American painters who were still alive.