Art v. Official Art

Said the late great French art critic Theodore Duret: "There is art and there is official art ... and there always will be." Most portrait-painting shows are filled with handsome, sycophantic canvases, obviously "official." Last week Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art put on a huge, unusual show containing 270 mostly "unofficial" portraits (done usually for the artist's own pleasure, without commission). Visitors had a chance to see what some of the most talented painters alive do with portraiture when free to be as sincere, malicious, foolish, irregular or what not as they like. Items:

P: Russian Marc Chagall (TIME, Oct. 26) showed an eight-foot, 1917 portrait of himself astride his wife's shoulders, and giggling. Under it was a 1941 photograph by Manhattan's George Platt Lynes of Art ist Chagall, still giggling, behind a bouquet of flowers .

P: U.S. Painter Ivan Le Lorraine Albright showed his terrifyingly seamed and ugly figure, And God Created Man in His Own Image, whose every* grey hair looks as if it could be plucked from its purple body.

P: German Otto Dix's astounding study of Dr. Meyer-Hermann with a fanciful X-ray device on his forehead suggested why the Nazi regime has restricted Dix to landscapes.

P: French Painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowsky) offered a wicked portrait of his friend French Painter Andre Derain in his dressing gown one bilious morning-after-the-week-before.

Faced with many such free-style virtuosities, observers might not blame the average vain sitter portraitists.* But the few bravura, turn-of-the-century, super-official portraits such as John Singer Sargent's Mrs. Fiske Warren and Her Daughter, and Giovanni Boldini's Miss Edith Blair, smartly included in the show, looked rather like candy-box covers among the rest of the displays.

* By U.S. common law, a portraitist can be denied his fee if the sitter has warned him that the work must be acceptable to himself, and it is not.

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