National Show

The first National Exhibition of American Art, held two years ago, and sponsored by Mayor LaGuardia's New York Municipal Art Committee, flopped flat. Almost its only distinction was that it brought to Manhattan more canvases than any show that season. When the second opened last year with 526 pictures and statues, critics were agreeably surprised, found the general level of painting higher, a few pieces outstanding, their subjects of coast-to-coast diversity. Last week, in the spacious galleries of the Fine Arts Society, the third National Exhibition turned out to be the best yet.

The National Exhibition is not a cross-section of the best contemporary U. S. painting. Selections are made by state committees picked by Governors. The number of pieces a State may exhibit is determined by its population rather than bv the number of good painters in it. New York has an additional rule that artists whose works have appeared in one National Exhibition are disqualified from later ones, thus excluding several like Reginald Marsh, Alexander Brook, William Zorach.

This year Ohio's Governor Martin Davey did not appoint a committee, pleaded inadequate funds; Connecticut, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Samoa and the Virgin Islands sent no pictures; the Kansas exhibit consisted of 14 tidy prints that might have been designed in a fastidious recoil from the ostentatious earthiness of Midwesterners like Thomas Benton and Grant Wood. That State committees were an unpredictable factor was equally apparent in the State of Washington exhibit, predominantly abstract, and the Massachusetts collection, which was academic, mythological, and as out of tune with its neighbors as a choir at a Benny Goodman swing concert.

As in last year's show, New York carried off most of the honors, this time with a soft-textured nude by George Grosz, a characteristic frozen-faced, deep green Landscape with Fisherman by Doris Lee, Isaac Soyer's indulgent School Girls and Robert Philipp's Dust to Dust, which won honorable mention at the Carnegie International last autumn (TIME, Oct. 25), showing bowed, blackrobed, firmly painted figures before an open grave, against a dull rainscape. There was no outstanding piece of sculpture like Carl Hallsthammar's Venus in Red Cherry of last year, but the exhibition introduced the work of a promising, 23-year-old, self-taught Syrian of New Orleans, Leon Koury, with a competent Negro figure, Compress Worker.

Last year, an outstanding contribution from New Mexico was the work of Ernest Leonard Blumenschein, whose paintings are so finely grained they suggest the surface of a highly polished piece of maple. This year, Artist Blumenschein's contribution was a populous piece called Ourselves and Taos Neighbors, in which celebrities like Mabel Dodge Luhan, the late D. H. Lawrence, Mr. & Mrs. Blumenschein, are planted as stiffly as figures in a family portrait in a maple-colored adobe interior. Typical of the surprises hidden among the 417 pieces in the show was the work of 42-year-old Novelist Ramon Guthrie, Scherzo from the Proud City: a reverential study of 19th Century French Critic Sainte-Beuve.

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