L'Art Cruel

Art can be an emetic for the smug and a warning to everybody. Seldom has such art been concentrated so deliberately with-in four walls as in an anti-war exhibition at Paris' Galerie Billiet last fortnight, called L'Art Cruel. The usual fate of such intentions has seldom been illustrated better than in the shallow frissons and Grand Guignol giggles with which swank Parisians responded to it. Contributors of the 48 paintings included Picasso, with his nightmarish Dreams & Lies of Franco (TIME, Dec. 27); Salvador Dali, with The Specter of Sex Appeal, in which a nai've little boy regards an enormous figure, half-flesh, half-bone, straddling an idyllic background; Andre Masson, with Dilettantes of Corpses, showing gowned ecclesiastics leaving a corpsy battlefield with expressions of pious approval; Frans Masereel, with News event, a horror panorama of agonized soldiers, screaming mobs and weeping women, and in the lower right-hand corner a well-dressed citizen reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar.

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