On View

There were some paintings hung on the walls of a tiny room in the Anderson Galleries; other paintings, smaller ones, rested on cabinets or stood along the floor. The room was full of people, talking to each other in awed, foolish whispers. In the corner of the room sat a lady dressed in a black cloth coat, smiling like a severe Mona Lisa. She was Georgia O'Keeffe; the paintings on the wall belonged to her because she had made them; for some reason, the room seemed hers as well.

If the people who looked at them appeared silly and ungainly, it was partly by contrast, because the paintings were neither. They are difficult paintings to write about. When Georgia O'Keeffe paints flowers, she does not paint fifty flowers stuffed into a dish. On most of her canvases there appeared one gigantic bloom, its huge feathery petals furled into some astonishing pattern of color and shade and line. A bee, busy with a paint brush, might so have reproduced the soft, enormous caves in which his pasturage is found. One of the.insects out of Henri Fabre, some thoughtful, sensitive caterpillar who had read Freud, might have so pictured the green and perpendicular avenues of his morning's promenade. But no caterpillar, however sensitive, no bee, however dexterous, could have traced, in the lines of a flower's petal, so suave, so decorative a design.

Most of the pictures were the images of flowers seen through two lenses; the first a powerful magnifying glass, the second the iris of a perspicacious inward eye, whose function was to give clarity a significance beyond the decorative. In the way a purple petunia spread its violent petals, there was a hint, a symbol for truths not necessarily too deep for words to reach but outside the meanings from which words have been derived. It is enough to say that Miss O'Keeffe's paintings are as full of passion as the verses of Solomon's Song.

Of this woman Critic Lewis Mumford has said: "She has beautified the sense of what it is to be a woman; she has revealed the intimacies of love's juncture with the purity and the absence of shame that lovers feel in their meeting; she has brought what was inarticulate and troubled and confused into the realm of conscious beauty, where it may be recalled and enjoyed with a new intensity; she has, in sum, found a language for experiences that are otherwise too intimate to be shared."

Georgia O'Keeffe is generally addressed by her last name; her husband is Alfred Stiegiitz who was the first connoisseur to see her paintings ..and the first to discover the merit in them. Georgia O'Keeffe had been brought up in Wisconsin and Virginia, had studied in Manhattan under William Chase, who, as she calmly observes, would immediately perish of bewilderment should he, by an accident, walk .into the room where her paintings are on view. She was teaching drawing to young people in Texas, when she sent two of her charcoal drawings to a girl in New York. The girl took them to Stiegiitz, whose gallery was then full of Matisse and Picasso, whose senseless innovations caused academicians to expire from apoplexy.

She has been incautiously heralded so often since that it pleases her to ponder a question which few painters would be brave enough to frame: "What do they think about these things when they go home to supper?" The people who stare at her pictures of apples, pears, eggplants, leaves, stalks, high buildings, rivers and tremendous flowers, interest her enormously. She, like George Bellows and unlike almost every other U. S. artist, has never gone abroad and doesn't want to; she paints all day on the 30th floor of the Shelton Hotel, Manhattan; her face is austere and beautiful; she does not own a fur coat.

The show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia, was not exciting, but it was large and, for a good number of fine paintings and a few excellent sculptures, worthwhile.

The portraits, all in all, were the most interesting pictures. One Feodor Zakharov's which took the $300 Lippincott award, foolishly titled Reverie, showed a woman in a black dress leaning against the back of a sofa; in her right hand was a book she had been reading five minutes before. Since then, the furiously traveling train of her consciousness had rolled down a steep, delicious scenic railway of thoughts and remembrances. Now this train was coasting slowly toward a standstill; the lady's eyes were closed with enigmatic pleasure; her smile would surely have annoyed a clever husband.

Abram Poole's portrait of Katharine Cornell was hung near the top of the main stairway, so that nearly everyone looked at it once when they came in and a second time when they went out. The first scrutiny was the more satisfactory. Artist Poole had put the actress against a dark background, wrapped her in a black cape, painted her hands brown, thin and nervous. Her face looked out from all this gloom with the terror of a child's half-dream in the dark. Nonetheless, the characterization was too taut and theatrical.

Philip L. Kale's Aphrodite of the Sea Gulls, a large canvas and well hung, was possibly the most striking picture in the show, not for its originality,: so much as for a brilliant and airy prettiness. The surprising tangle of branches streaked with light in Ross E. Draught's Dead Chestnut gave the tree as much character as a face. William M. Paxton had sent in three portraits, for one of which he got the Beck Gold Medal.

The sculpture was limited, for the most part, to small and decorative bronzes. There was the usual abundance of birdbaths and fountain figurines. Albert Stewart's Polar Bear got the Widener Memorial Medal, which it well deserved. Katharine W. Lane's heavy, proud horse was small but complete in its effect, and Canova would have liked C. P. Jennewein's Coral.