Fair Fight

Last week President Grover Aloysius Whalen of the New York World's Fair Corporation was constrained to do some agile explaining. When he was all through, the status of the fine arts at the New York World's Fair had been greatly clarified, but it looked as if Mr. Whalen was still on the spot.

For nearly a year the Fair's Board of Design has been holding inconclusive meetings with representatives of 16 artists' associations who thought something should be done for contemporary U. S. art at the Fair but had no very clear notion what. One reason they were up in the air was that no free ground, no building for an art exhibition had been allotted in the original plans. Artists with an exalted idea of what the World's Fair should be gradually began to get sore about this.

Last week a letter appeared in the New York Post from Paul Manship, who is designing the most prominent sculpture at the Fair, recalling that "even Chicago counterbalanced its fan dancer with a world-famous art exhibit" (at the Art Institute, a mile away from the fair grounds), and boldly asking his clients: "Are exhibitions at the Fair to be limited to products that carry a price tag? ... Is this to be a World's Fair worthy of New York, or another glorified Coney Island?"

To this first bean-spilling, gardenia-loving Grover Whalen replied that the Fair Corporation could not provide safe housing for a costly art exhibition unless it erected a permanent, fireproof building, unlike the temporary structures planned for the Fair. Instead of this, he said, arrangements were being made with the Metropolitan Museum (eight miles from the fair grounds) "and other like institutions" to hold exhibitions presumably like Chicago's. This message, which also appeared in the Post, was brought to the regular meeting between the artists' representatives and the Fair Board of Design. Mr. Manship's fellow artists were far from mollified, Mr. Whalen's plans for correlating art exhibitions on Manhattan Island were described as applesauce, and the artists voted to call on Mayor LaGuardia for help in getting an independent building.

Soon a second, more elaborate announcement from Grover Aloysius Whalen reached Manhattan city desks. Remembering what he had not remembered before, Mr. Whalen called attention to "a major art project for the New York World's Fair of 1939" involving a Community Arts Centre, where workers in the arts will display the processes of painting, sculpture and printing. "Through these 'arts in production'," said Mr. Whalen, "we hope to bring home to the average man that a work of art is not something conceived on Olympus but is produced by people very much like himself." As an exposition of The World of Tomorrow, Mr. Whalen explained, the Fair would be devoted to functional art, "woven into the very warp and woof" of avenues and buildings. "Instead of a few hundred thousand people seeing the old masters isolated in one building," he proclaimed, "50,000,000 visitors will find art all around them--to the right, to the left and even underfoot."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.