Pieces of Worlds

Three solo shows in Manhattan this week invited critics to speculate on the artistic possibilities of the terrible, the humane and the naive.

Haunted Grosz. Since he arrived in the U. S. in 1932, Artist George Grosz has made small capital of his fame as No. 1 War satirist and scourge of post-War vice in Germany. Settled in Douglaston, L. I. with his wife and two small sons, Artist Grosz instead apprenticed himself to the art of oil painting in 1934, has worked hard at it ever since. Last year his explosive Street Fight stirred visitors at a Whitney Museum annual (TIME, Jan. 3, 1938); single "Studies in Textures" have appeared elsewhere. Last autumn George Grosz became a U. S. citizen. This week he was finally ready for his first one-man show of paintings at the Walker Galleries.

If there was doubt of Artist Grosz's accomplishment in oil, the wiry strength, textural richness, clean color and solid finish of several still life and nude studies dispelled it. But the gaiety and sensuous life of these paintings made all the more striking a number of gruesome, garish or ruined landscapes and the latest, largest picture on view, A Piece of My World (see cut). This one harked back to the line drawings the artist made at 23, when he was a German pacifist who had been condemned to death but let off with front-line service on the Western Front. It was a grey and dirt-colored allegory of war which, like the Thirty Years War in Europe (1618-48), lasted so long that men forgot, in disease, starvation and insanity, what they were fighting for. The witlings who stumble to the attack in A Piece of My World do so with forks for bayonets, rats for their baggage train, ruin for their objective.

A roundish, solid man in immaculate dark clothes, with fine tight features and bright brown eyes, George Grosz has more to say of his precise technical discipline than of his feelings. But last week he confessed to a fascination with horror tales and movies, tapped his round head solemnly as he declared: "Every survivor is a haunted house."

Croat's America. Once known as Yugoslavia's finest portrait painter, Croatian Maximilian Vanka was not months in the U. S. two years ago when he painted, for a little Roman Catholic Church in Millvale, Pa., a stunning set of murals to which art lovers have been making pilgrimage ever since (TIME, July 19, 1937). Last week slight, courtly, volatile Artist Vanka nearly popped with affability and shyness as Manhattan's Newhouse Galleries opened an exhibition of his work in the U. S.

Like his friend, Louis Adamic, "Maxo" Vanka has a love of poor people and a tireless zeal in studying them. Among his sepia drawings were two that made many a visitor gulp with humanitarian rage: spots of sunlight on a wall under Brooklyn Bridge with bums standing in each spot for warmth; three old slatterns on an alley bench, one drunk and swollen, clinging to elegance with a shawl, one still sturdy and vicious. But the best things in the show were Artist Vanka's palette knife paintings, smooth, slightly van Goghish, brilliantly composed, of a Bowery poolroom, a small-time movie house, cheap restaurant.

Simple Soul. Late one night in 1931 a Russian tenor named Vladimir Doriani hunched his small, round bulk into a Russian train on the way from one small town to another. At about 2 a.m., dozing, he began to look at other passengers and they looked strange: like cutouts. Singer Doriani, who had always hated pictures felt overcome by a desire to draw.

Last spring Sidney Janis, a Manhattan connoisseur, was strolling through the annual outdoor exhibition of artists on Washington Square. Primitive most of the pictures were, but truly Primitive were those of an unknown named William Doriani. Last week, amid sophisticated hosannas on 57th Street, the works of Tenor Doriani painted in fresh color patterns with flattened childish figures, were exhibited at the Marie Harriman Gallery as pure naive paintings in a class with those of the late Pittsburgh House Painter John Kane.

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