Metropolitan's Moderns

A citadel of priceless antiquities and such Old Masters as only millionaires can buy, Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art was long regarded as a costly tomb in which no contemporary art could live. A fund of $150,000 was established by the late George Arnold Hearn, who subsequently added another $100,000 in memory of his son Arthur Hoppock, to change all this. In the past ten years 85 paintings by living U. S. artists have been bought by the Metropolitan. Last week a significant addition to this catalog was announced: an oil by William Gropper, oldtime cartoonist on the radical New Masses and Daily Worker, who began to show his paintings two years ago.

Called The Hunt, the Gropper picture is a sombre scene in deep yellows. Armed men and dogs are coursing through a scrubby thicket under a hill. The grim haste of the figures plainly implies that The Hunt's quarry is Man. Explained Artist Gropper: "I felt the irony of the hunt--the sportsman's equal pleasure in hunting game and hunting Negroes--and I decided to commit it to paint."

At the Metropolitan last week, critics and gallery-goers had a chance to inspect The Hunt together with the 16 other contemporary U. S. paintings acquired this year with the Hearn funds. Already on view were such old hands as Edward Hopper, Bernard Karfiol, Max Weber, Louis Eilshemius, Augustus Vincent Tack. For the first time appeared equally well-known George Biddle, William Glackens, vigorous, self-taught Joe Jones of Missouri, Henry Botkin, Robert Brackman, Alexander James, Sidney Laufman, Henry E. Mattson, Paul Sample, Louis Bouche. Showgoers lifted most surprised eyebrows when they beheld Doris Lee's Catastrophe, which showed a Zeppelin in flames over Manhattan, its passengers drifting earthward in parachutes (see cut). Working in arty Woodstock, N. Y., Mrs. Lee finished her fantasy long before the Hindenburg disaster. Painting the Manhattan skyline last August, she saw the Hindenburg fly over and imagined how it would look if it exploded.

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