Chicago Project

Of all public galleries in the U. S., Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art was the first to draw upon the Federal Art Project for an important exhibition. The potentialities shown in the Museum's selection, called "New Horizons in American Art," elevated many a New Yorker's indifferent eyebrows (TIME, Sept. 21, 1936). In other cities, galleries have prudently gone slow on WPA exhibitions, waiting for quality to accumulate. Last week Chicago's great Art Institute, able to skim the cream from more than three years' work by local artists, opened the biggest, handsomest WPA show yet held in the U.S.

To Chicagoans it seemed significant that this exhibition took the place of one of the Institute's established annuals--a summer show of independent Chicago artists. Although only about 300 artists are enrolled in the Chicago project, compared to about 1,200 in New York, the painting divisions in Chicago have been notable from the start for a higher average of professional competence. Apparent reason: making a living is harder in Chicago, more first-raters rate relief. Last week's 12,000 visitors, sauntering down the nine cool galleries of the Institute's east wing, found scarcely a boondoggling brush stroke.

Admired by critics of all schools were 50 skilled drawings and water colors from the Index of American Design. Like the State Guides produced by the Writers' Project, this nationwide compilation is the outcome of WPA teamwork. The stimulation of group work appearing elsewhere among the 320-odd paintings, prints, murals and sculpture on view was an occasion for pride to Daniel Catton Rich, the Art Institute's cheerful, hulking young director.

"To anyone interested in trends in American art," said he, "this exhibition is extremely revealing. ... A healthier balance between content and interpretation is on the way. We find artists on the same project influencing one another in the significant manner that artists' groups have always influenced their members. . . ."

Possibly just as influential on Chicago's WPA painting are certain restrictions on subject matter imposed by the assistant to the national director, shrewd, brown-eyed Mrs. Increase Robinson. They are: no nudes, no dives, no social propaganda. Presumably tranquilized by these exclusions, by a living wage of $94 a month and by freedom from any compulsion to be fashionable, such exhibiting artists as Raymond Breinin, Lester Schwartz, William Schwartz, Hester Miller Murray, Joseph Vavak and Mitchell Siporin showed growing talent, intelligence, style. In sculpture the variety was especially striking, from Mary Anderson's crisp Alice in Wonderland (see cut), in which the technique of Magazine Artist Joseph Christian Leyendecker seemed adapted to stone, to Edouard Chassaing's knotty, Gothic Aesculapius (see cut). Most curious planes were observed in a plaster "diorama" entitled Reclamation of Eroded Farm Land (see cut), by Chicago's rugged old-timer Rudolph Weisenborn.

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