U. S. Prints

For three years, with the collaboration of the Associated American Artists, Art Critic Thomas Craven has been sorting 2,500 U. S. lithographs and etchings into a big heap of rejections, a little heap of selections. His little heap appeared last week as a book* containing 100 (10 in. by 13 in.) black & white prints by such top-flight U. S. artists as Thomas Benton, John Steuart Curry, Boardman Robinson, John Sloan, Grant Wood, for the first time brought together the most significant black-&-whites by outstanding U. S. artists in a handy, inexpensive form. Thoughtfully, the publishers perforated the binding edge of all the prints so they may be taken out for framing.

If none of the Treasury of American Prints was new, most were standard favorites: few of Critic Craven's prints were misprints. Big-shot artists such as Benton, Curry, Sloan and Wood were allotted five or six pages apiece, others from one to three. There were prints to suit everybody. People who itch and fidget when confronted with the self-conscious strainings of Thomas Benton's I Got a Girl on Sourwood Mountain could turn a page to his Lonesome Road. For people who consider John Steuart Curry's darkly violent lithograph Line Storm "theatrical," Critic Craven supplied a pasture pastoral like Curry's bully Ajax. Others who sometimes wonder why Grant Wood indulges in such painstakingly stuffy satire as Honorary Degree (see cut) could admire his slick Seedtime and Harvest. Subtler was the humor of whimsical Doris Lee, who in her Winter in the Catskills successfully unrolled a cosmic panorama of mountain as a backdrop for a skater's spill.

*A TREASURY OF AMERICAN PRINTS--edited by Thomas Craven--Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

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