Thrills & Dales

Manhattan gallerygoers were all agog. They read the names Cezanne, Derain, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, all in one announcement. They rushed to the sedate, vermicular-stoned Wildenstein Galleries. There they paid $1 apiece for the benefit of the French Hospital, were permitted last week to maunder through two small rooms hung with 51 modernist French paintings of the first rank. Such a concourse is rare, even among Manhattan opportunities.

Composed entirely of accepted modernist leaders, the exhibition proved that the freakishness of cubism, vorticism, other truculent cults, is quite defunct. There was little that was crude, nothing that was incoherent. Gaugin's bizarre self-portrait seemed to link his face with his own favorite Tahitian fruits; the sardonic humor of the piece was queer but clear. He displayed also a serene Breton landscape, a lovely canvas which could cause no retching among the most conservative. Forain's aphrodisiac The Charleston showed two vibrant white dancers, several paunchy satyr-spectators, was a triumph of contemporary comment. Picasso's The Mother, a suggestion of haggard peasantry, was as successful in another field. There were gusty, sulphurous landscapes by de Vlaminck, fanciful figures in delicately modulated colors by Eugene Zak. The net effect was one of diversified, eclectic appeal. There was much to please, in many manners.

The pictures were loaned by Mr. & Mrs. Cheer Dale of Manhattan. The red-headed Mr. Dale is an investment banker, a member of the Stock Exchange, a director of Western railroads, New Jersey public utilities. During the war he established a Liberty Loan office, sold innumerable bonds. His dynamic existence takes him twice a year to France. He chases over the fairways at St. Cloud, chases to art collectors, buys with zest. With him goes the gracious Mrs. Dale, herself a painter of stage decorations, a writer of cogent art criticism. In three years they have gathered more than 300 modern French paintings, from the glossy classicism of David to the vaporous prettiness of Marie Laurencin.

Blue Eyes

"It is recorded that the color of George Washington's eyes was a light, greyish blue. But when painting his famous portraits of him, Gilbert Stuart made them a deeper blue."

Stuart did so in anticipation of the fading of his paints. Amazingly, his paints did not fade. The fact is recalled by the sedate Boston Transcript, to whose readers a current centennial exhibition of Stuart's portraits is a matter of more than passing interest.

Bostonians were equally interested just after Artist Stuart's death in 1828 when a possibly larger exhibition was held there on behalf of impoverished Mrs. Stuart and her four daughters. Having painted more than a thousand portraits, including the first five Presidents of the U. S. and two

European monarchs, Stuart died almost penniless.

The best known and most significant painter of U. S. portraits lay for many years in an unmarked grave in the old General Central Burying Ground in Boston Common. In 1897 the Paint and Clay Club attached a bronze tablet in the form of a palette.

Included in the exhibition are the famous Athenaeum paintings of George and Martha Washington. Of them spoke John Neal in the Atlantic Monthly (1868), saying: "If Washington should return to life and stand side by side with the portrait and not resemble it he would be called an impostor." Also included are the portraits of the first five Presidents, painted on mahogany panels planned to resemble the texture of canvas; the first painting ever done by Stuart (at the age of 12); the alleged last painting he ever did (of Mrs. John Forrester); that of Commodore Oliver Hazzard Perry.

Dying at 72, Artist Stuart's brushwork remained unimpaired, though he is said to have been forced to ask a friend (George Brimmer) to sign a canvas for him, his hand being too shaky. As a rule he neither signed nor completed portraits. His daughter Jane is said to have completed many of them for him, his interest ending when he had done the face.

Said Artist Stuart on being asked why he rarely signed his work: "I mark them all over!" Said he of the famed Washington portrait: "When I painted him he had just had a set of false teeth inserted, which accounts for the constrained expression so noticeable about the mouth and lower part of the face."

Washington sat for three portraits. Of these, one was scratched out by Stuart ; the other two were retained unfinished by him in order that he might copy and sell them in quantities. When he needed money, said his daughter, he would copy one in a few hours.

The exhibition, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, lasts until Dec. 9.

Pittsburgh Pigments

He who would see the year's best group of contemporary paintings must go to Pittsburgh, Cleveland or Chicago. Nowhere else will the Carnegie Institute's 27th International Exhibition be shown.* Reproductions will be plentiful, but they are makeshifts. They indicate form, com position, but lose the sumptuous significance of color.

In Pittsburgh a conglomerate swarm padded about the galleries, grouped itself according to tastes before 381 paintings. Esthetes looked at landscapes, still life, murmured abstrusely of planes, tonality, feeling. Paintings from these categories won most of the prizes. The great philistine majority, as usual, neglected pots, petunias, pastures; it preferred pictures containing human figures.

Of the nudes, some, including Italian Achille Funi's The Awakening of Venus, had little to commend them. Others were sensational, like Britisher Laura Knight's baldly anatomical Dressing for the Ballet. This study was too frank to be voluptuous. Squeamish persons felt as if they had opened the wrong door. But Eileen, a seated girl in a chemise, thrilled everyone with its pliancy of shoulders, arms, tapering hands. A soft sidewise fall of light allowed Miss Dod Procter the use of tremulous chiaroscuro. She is an adept in the nuances of reflected light, a familiar phase of architectural rendering, an annoying technical problem.

Many persons paused before John Car roll's Three People. At a small table sat two women in low-neck, a youth in a felt hat. There was a siphon bottle, glasses. Painter Carroll's first interest is character, which he sharply exposes. Technique is subservient. The utter spiritual inertia on the three faces suggested a U. S. speak easy scene. But the realistic 1 franc 50 centimes mark on a dish confessed France.

American Thomas Dewing's Spring halted the sentimentalists. Two voluminous-skirted, unmistakable ladies sat in a twilight garden. One played on the cello. The other put hands to heart. Puffy Victorian gentlemen sighed, passed on to Austrian Victor Hammer's portait of Miss Elinor Patterson as The Nun in The Miracle. Exquisite are the features of this daughter of Joseph Medill Patterson, famed Chicago newspaper tycoon. Defined by the austerity of the nun's habit they resulted in a formal study of severe beauty. Italian Anselmo Bucci's The Drinker, wore both belt and suspenders, gazed out over the rim of his glass with the tender, bleary eyes of the veteran toper.

This endless medley of styles, subjects, nations was bewildering. Tracing the stylistic lineage of the paintings would be as difficult as noting the forebears of the scattered painters. Homer St. Gaudens, son of the late, famed sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens, faced a dilemma as Fine Arts Director of the Institute. His duty was to interpret the exhibition for the public. "At no time," he said, "has art, like society, offered so varied an interest, or so confused a program." Optimists, like Director St. Gaudens, foresee the evolution of a more stable, unified expression. Pessimists sense the breaking down of all styles, the dissolution of Western art.

The Carnegie Jury of Award, Director Homer St. Gaudens, Painters Anto Carte (Belgium), Colin Gill (England), Rockwell Kent, Ernest Lawson (U. S.), had to pick a first-prize painting from the welter of contrasting appeal. To the amazement of all they were able to declare unanimously. They chose Andre Derain's large still life of game birds, shotgun, shooting jacket. Frenchman Derain once mixed with Us Fauves (the Wild Beasts) a belligerent group which sought new, ex citing expression. Lately he has reverted to a sobriety almost classic. Still life ignores the panoramic, the massive, the personal. If the award signified anything it was the triumph of this traditional dig nity over recent, threatening hysterias in paint.

*Pittsburgh, until Dec. 9; Cleveland, Jan. 7-Feb. 17; Chicago, March 11-April 21. In Cleveland and Chicago only the European section will be shown.