Week of Weeks

Last week U. S. art, for all the world like a defense industry, poured its output on the nation. It did so at President Roosevelt's behest. "It is evident that we must find ways of translating our interest in American creative expression into active popular support expressed in terms of purchase." So he wrote three months ago to Francis Henry Taylor, director of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum, asking him to head a council for a nationwide celebration of Art Week. Gathering 147 National Council members from every corner of the country, Director Taylor laid plans for the biggest art shindig the U. S. had ever seen. Its purposes: 1) to get the U. S. public to buy more art; 2) to get artists to sell their work at prices within reach of the average man's pocketbook.

Last week was Art Week. So thoroughly had Director Taylor and his councilmen stirred things up that some 32,000 U. S. artists displayed paintings, etchings, sculpture and knickknacks for sale in over 1,600 exhibitions, some of them in towns that had never seen an art exhibition before. Six hundred and fifty-three museums and schools, 5,000 stores, 782 art organizations, hundreds of individuals contributed money for exhibition space and running expenses. WPA furnished labor. Famous painters and sculptors hung works that might have graced any museum. Nobodies with an itch for the smell of turpentine displayed everything from incompetent daubs to genuine "primitives." For sheer quantity of canvas and paint, nothing like Art Week had ever been seen even in the peak days of the Italian Renaissance.

In arty Sierra Madre, Los Angeles suburb, artists painted models in the streets. In front of Portland, Ore.'s handsome neo-Georgian Museum of Art (its fac,ade draped with red, white and blue bunting) a WPA brass band trumpeted God Bless America, while museum attendance jumped from 75 to 400 daily. Detroit's sedate Institute of Arts put on a price-marked display of Grand Rapids furniture. In Lewisburg, Pa. pastors of all denominations and an esthete named Prof. B. Gummo sermonized and lectured on "What is Art?" In Chicago a streamlined sound truck of abstract design toured the Loop enthusiastically wailing plugs for Art Week. On nearby sidewalks pretty models paraded with paintings stuck to them like sandwich boards. In Rochester the art show in the Civic Exhibits Building vied for honors with a poultry show where a human crowing contest was in progress, hired an orchestra to drown out the crowers.

One super-sane note was struck by followers of Mrs. Frank Granger Logan's Chicago Society for Sanity in Art: Loganite Painter Oscar Scharer hung, as the All-Illinois Art Society's "picture of the week," a painting of a horse laughing at a gallery wall of surrealist and abstract pictures.

Despite Art Week's purpose--to put art within reach of the average man's pocket-book--many exhibitors got fancy ideas about value. In Manhattan's impoverished Harlem, at the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, asking prices ranged from $50 to $2,000. Painter F. G. Schoen of Jacksonville, Fla. pinned a tag for $10,000 on his picture of a Madonna and child. In Rochester another $10,000 Madonna was submitted by an Italian immigrant woman named Caroline Vara. Painter Vara's Madonna, which swooned biliously with unintentional surrealism over a macrocephalic child, was painted after a $175 correspondence course in art. When asked why the high price, Caroline Vara, who is receiving Federal relief, replied simply: "Itsa verra nice-a peekch."

By the time the shouting had died, impartial critics tried to estimate Art Week's serious value. Though artists, big & little, were loud in their joy over Art Week's quantity production, many first-rate artists had either refused to exhibit or had hung their least salable work. Though by mid-week Cleveland bought $1,250, San Francisco $1,300, New Orleans $210.15, Los Angeles $2,000, Denver $600, Jacksonville $580, Portland, Ore., $329.10 and New York City $2,700 worth of art, sales managers, disappointed in these figures, figured that Art Week's main purpose (selling art) was a flop. But art-loving President Roosevelt was undaunted. Said he: "I feel justified in recommending that Art Week be made an annual event. . . . The fact that so much was done in a brief preparatory period this year justifies the establishment of this work on a permanent basis."

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