1939: Painting And Sculpture

Art in the United States.

In Europe the war had a paralyzing effect upon the art world, but in America the year 1939 was unusually active in art. Several factors contributed to this increased activity and interest.

Ever since 1934 the United States Government has been the greatest single patron of the arts, and it retained this role in 1939 in spite of curtailment of the program by Congressional action. The art program of the Works Progress Administration continued to employ several thousand artists, and the Section of Fine Arts gave commissions to artists to decorate Federal buildings.

The chief rivals of the United States Government in art patronage (of great importance in stimulating popular interest), were the two expositions of 1939, the New York World's Fair and the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. A large number of American painters and sculptors, as well as a few Europeans, received commissions to decorate the buildings and grounds of both Fairs. Besides the work commissioned by the Fairs themselves, private exhibitors employed artists extensively in the arrangement and decoration of their buildings, so that art played a prominent part in both expositions. In addition the two Fairs sponsored splendid art exhibitions which were visited by more than a million and a half people. At the New York World's Fair an exhibition of 'Masterpieces of Art' was organized by a group of collectors, art experts and museum officials, led by Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice of New York, with Dr. W. R. Valentiner of the Detroit Institute of Arts as director-general. At San Francisco Dr. Walter Heil, director of the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, and an operating committee headed by Dr. Grace McCann Morley and Charles Stafford Duncan, assembled a large and important old master exhibition. Both these exhibitions were assembled from private collections and museums in America and Europe, and the San Francisco show was augmented by an unprecedented loan of 28 masterpieces of painting and sculpture from the Italian Government, including the Madonna of the Chair by Raphael, the Birth of Venus by Botticelli and a marble Madonna and Child by Michelangelo. These old master exhibitions, for which a precedent had been set by Chicago's Century of Progress in 1933 and 1934, aroused an enormous amount of interest and excitement on the part of the public. The Italian masterpieces were exhibited later at the Chicago Art Institute and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Contemporary American art was also given extensive exhibition space at the two Fairs. In New York the Fair authorities first announced that the Fair would sponsor no art exhibition, since art 'permeated' the design of the Fair itself, but late in 1938, in response to protests and demands from artists and public, a contemporary art show for the Fair was organized under the direction of Holger Cahill, national director of the WPA Art Program. A building for this exhibition was provided by the Fair and 1,214 examples of painting, sculpture and graphic art were selected by juries in every section of the country for exhibition. From the show the Fair purchased 31 works for presentation to museums in various sections of the country, and several prominent museums purchased art from the show. At San Francisco the contemporary American art exhibition was selected by Roland J. McKinney, former director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, acting as a one-man jury. Prizes totaling $10,400 were given for contemporary art, both European and American.

Besides the contemporary American shows, both Fairs were rich in exhibitions of the art of other countries, in which practically every major foreign nation was represented. Prominent among the foreign shows at the New York Fair were the International Business Machines exhibition of art from 79 countries; the British, French, Argentine and Canadian art exhibitions; and the Swedish decorative design show. San Francisco had an important showing of European art, with loans chosen in part by foreign juries and in part from America's own collection. Also at San Francisco, Dr. Langdon Warner of Harvard University organized a remarkable exhibition of the art of the Pacific basin, representing more than 30 cultures which bordered on the Asiatic and American shores of the Pacific Ocean. In addition a very successful exhibition of American Indian arts and handicrafts was organized by René d'Harnancourt.

Another factor contributing to the increase of popular interest in art was the much publicized opening in May of the new building of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This two-million-dollar structure is the first museum building in the modern style in the United States. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, devoted to the encouragement of 'non-objective' art of which it owns some 800 examples, also opened an exhibition called 'Art of Tomorrow' in a building of its own in New York.

Museum Exhibitions.

Museums in New York and San Francisco and other cities responded to the stimulus provided by the two Fairs with impressive exhibitions geared especially to the unusual crowds of sightseers from all over the country. The Metropolitan Museum in New York assembled an extremely interesting exhibition of paintings illustrating 'Life in America' during 300 years. The Museum of Modern Art in New York opened its new building with a large and varied exhibition entitled 'Art in Our Time,' which comprised painting, sculpture, prints, photography, architecture, industrial art and films. The painting section of this exhibition contained 225 outstanding works of art by leading European and American artists of the late 19th and the 20th centuries. The Brooklyn (N. Y.) Museum had an exhibition of 'Popular Art in America' in which the so-called American folk art — paintings, carvings, and useful objects by artisans, craftsmen and amateur artists — was effectively shown. The National Academy in New York showed the work of its membership in 'A Century of the National Academy.' The Riverside Museum, of New York, had the largest Latin-American exhibition ever held here, sponsored by the U. S. World's Fair Commission and including work from nine countries. In San Francisco the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum held an exhibition entitled 'Frontiers of American Art' consisting of paintings, sculpture, murals, etc., done for the WPA Federal Art Project.

Apart from the old master exhibitions held at the New York and San Francisco Fairs, the year's outstanding show of this nature was the international loan exhibition of Flemish painting sponsored jointly by the Worcester (Mass.) Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and displayed at both institutions. This very important exhibition contained 132 paintings covering the period of Flemish art from the time of its founder, Jan Van Eyck, to Rubens. The John G. Johnson Collection, which was given to Philadelphia, and which is the largest group of Flemish paintings outside of Flanders, formed the nucleus of the exhibition, with the addition of important loans from other American museums and private collections. The Detroit Institute of Arts arranged an impressive showing of 17th century Dutch landscape painting. The Philadelphia Museum held the most comprehensive exhibition ever shown in America of the art of William Blake, English poet and visionary (1757-1827). An exhibition of the work of the French classicist painters, Jacques Louis David and J. A. D. Ingres, was held at the Springfield (Mass.) Museum of Fine Arts, while the work of the French romantic painters, Baron Gros, Géricault, Delacroix and others, was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art.

In the field of contemporary art the many annual and biennial exhibitions held in American museums took place as usual in 1939. Outstanding among these were the Carnegie Institute's International in Pittsburgh, which was fortunate in arranging for the shipment of pictures from Europe before the outbreak of war; the Whitney Museum's American annual; and the annuals at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the St. Louis City Art Museum. This year the Art Institute of Chicago waived its long-standing annual in favor of an interesting variation called 'Fifty Years of American Art,' a selection of 181 paintings and 46 sculptures which had been in the Institute's annuals from 1888 to 1938. Recognition of the importance and value of contemporary art in a museum's program was made by Seymore Knox's gift of $100,000 to the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, N. Y., to found a contemporary art room in the museum which will function as a sort of testing ground for the art of today. Here works of art will be continuously displayed and a certain number will be purchased from the exhibitions. A provocative show was assembled by Boston's Institute of Modern Art and shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in that city. Called 'Sources of Modern Painting,' it consisted of 40 modern pictures paired off with the paintings, sculptures or other objects most clearly indicated as their prototypes. This exhibition was later shown in a New York gallery. The Cleveland Museum of Art held an exhibition entitled 'Expressionism and Related Movements,' in which the great modern German art movement was shown, with works of art closely akin in spirit produced in Europe and America in the last three decades. The Springfield (Mass.) Museum of Fine Arts also showed German art of the 20th century. New York's Riverside Museum held an international show of the work of women painters and sculptors exclusive of Americans.

The large retrospective exhibition of 40 years of the art of Picasso, assembled by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and sponsored jointly by that museum and the Art Institute of Chicago (where it will be displayed early in 1940), was by far the most important one-man show held in America in 1939. This exhibition comprised more than 360 works in painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, book illustration and theater design, and would have been augmented by the inclusion of recent works of sculpture had not the European war made that impossible. It was the first Picasso exhibition of such size and scope ever undertaken in America, and the second largest held anywhere, the Picasso exhibition in Zurich in 1932 having been somewhat larger. Other one-man shows of contemporary work held in museums were those of Charles Sheeler at the Museum of Modern Art, Joseph Stella at the Newark (N. J.) Museum, and a memorial show of the work of Allen Tucker at the Whitney Museum in New York. The Century Club of New York also arranged an exhibition of paintings by the late George Bellows.

To celebrate the 2000th anniversary of the birth of the Emperor Augustus, every phase of artistic life under the first Roman emperor was represented in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. 'The Mask in Art' was the subject of an interesting comparative exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, and the pre-Columbian art of Mexico, Central America and Peru was displayed at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The unexcelled craftsmanship in architecture, furniture and household utensils of that strange and interesting American religious sect, the Shakers, was made the subject of an exhibition by the Worcester Art Museum. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts held an exhibition of the results of 150 years of private art collecting in New England. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond gathered from private houses in the state an extremely interesting group of early American portraits never before shown publicly. A novel development in civic enterprise was the sponsorship of a large and inclusive art exhibition by the city of Bloomington, Ill., thus setting a precedent for other cities far from the large art centers.

Exhibitions by Artist Organizations in New York.

The American Artists' Congress held its third annual membership exhibition, a lively showing of over 250 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints. An organization of about 60 well-known American artists, called An American Group, held a membership show, and the American Abstract Artists, numbering 53 members, held its annual membership show at the Riverside Museum. Exhibitions held by sculptors' organizations are described under the heading of Sculpture.

Exhibitions in Dealers' Galleries.

Outstanding among dealers' exhibitions in New York City were the following: 'Classics of the Nude from Pollaiuolo to Picasso'; 17th century Dutch paintings; 11 paintings by Tintoretto from American collections; portraits of Washington and other 18th century Americans; 'The Stage in Art for 300 Years'; the work of two American romantics, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Robert Loftin Newman; portraits by Renoir; paintings by two famous women artists, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt; Paris as seen by its painters; a centennial exhibition of paintings by Cézanne; trompe-l'oeil paintings of still life by William Harnett, a forgotten American of the 1870's and 80's. There were also memorial exhibitions of paintings by Kimon Nicolaides and Robert Henri. Picasso's great mural painting, Guernica, which was painted for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exposition in 1937, was brought to New York by the American Artists' Congress and shown for the benefit of the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign; it was later shown in San Francisco and Chicago.

The following living American painters were among the many who had one-man exhibitions in New York galleries: Revington Arthur, A. S. Baylinson, Thomas Benton, Eugene Berman, George Biddle, Feiga Blumberg, Aaron Bohrod, Henry Botkin, Raymond Breinin, Charles Burchfield, David Burliuk, Clarence Carter, Federico Castellón, Minna Citron, Russell Cowles, Adolf Dehn, Nathaniel Dirk, Arthur G. Dove, Louis Eilshemius, Louis Ferstadt, William Gropper, George Grosz, James Guy, Hananiah Harari, Marsden Hartley, Peter Hurd, Jo Jones, Mervin Jules, Georgiana Klitgaard, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jack Levine, E. Barnard Lintott, Frank London, Luigi Lucioni, De Hirsh Margules, John Marin, Reginald Marsh, Henry Mattson, Knud Merrild, Barse Miller, Paul Mommer, Laszlo de Nagy, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jose Clemente Orozco (Mexican), Victor de Pauw, Waldo Peirce, Walter Quirt, Abraham Rattner, Doris Rosenthal, Louis Schanker, Katherine Schmidt, Georges Schreiber, John Sloan, Vincent Spagna, Rufino Tamayo (Mexican), Frederic Taubes and Herman Trunk.

Continued interest in the work of 'primitive' or naive artists was evidenced in exhibitions of the work of the Americans, Mario Baccante, William Doriani, Lawrence Lebduska, O. A. Renne, Dr. Marion Souchon and Patrick Taccard, and the Europeans, Jean Eve and Louis Vivin. Walt Disney, of animated cartoon fame, exhibited original drawings for 'Snow White;' and four cartoonists well known in The New Yorker — James Thurber, William Steig, Peter Arno, and Alajalov — exhibited their drawings.

Among European painters who had one-man shows in New York were Max Beckmann, Francesco Bores, Massimo Campigli, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, André Derain, Dietz Edzard, Raoul Dufy, Karl Hofer, Vassily Kandinsky, Léonid, Jean Lurçat, Franz Masereel, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Alfred Sisley, Chaim Soutine, Yves Tanguy and Maurice Utrillo.

Sculpture.

During 1939 the tremendous increase in activity and interest in the field of sculpture, which was evidenced so strikingly in 1938, continued in even greater degree. The United States Government's art projects, which for several years have employed a great many sculptors and have initiated sculptural projects on a scale such as is seldom undertaken privately, have greatly stimulated the artists themselves and have also captured the interest and enthusiasm of the public. The New York World's Fair and the Golden Gate International Exposition added further impetus to the art of sculpture in 1938 and 1939, making heroic sculpture an integral part of the design of the two expositions.

The Sculptors Guild, an organization of distinguished sculptors which through its exhibitions has played a very considerable role in the present flowering of the art of sculpture in America, held its second annual outdoor exhibition, lasting several months, in a vacant lot at Park Avenue and 39th Street, New York. The United American Sculptors, a division of the United American Artists, a C.I.O. affiliate, held its first annual exhibition in New York at the New School for Social Research; this exhibition contained many interesting works but suffered very much for lack of space. The Whitney Museum of American Art held its annual contemporary American sculpture exhibition.

The opening of the new building of the Museum of Modern Art in New York brought before the public not only a specially designed gallery of contemporary sculpture but also an outdoor sculpture garden, about 400 feet long and 100 feet wide, in which over thirty important examples of modern European and American sculpture are exhibited. In Boston the Institute of Modern Art held a large two-man exhibition of works by the two most distinguished French sculptors of the older generation, Aristide Maillol and Charles Despiau. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, arranged a memorial exhibition of sculpture by the American Henry Clews, the first showing of his work in America since 1914. The Newark Museum held a retrospective exhibition of sculpture by Anna V. H. Huntington, known chiefly for her bronzes of animals. In London Jacob Epstein, American-born sculptor famous for his controversial figures of Christ and Eve, placed on view his latest work, a seven-foot pink alabaster figure of Adam, which caused a storm of protest from conservative art circles.

The following American sculptors had one-man exhibitions of their work in dealers' galleries in New York: Alexander Archipenko, Richmond Barth‚, Stuart Benson, Alexander Calder, José de Creeft, Jo Davidson, Lu Duble, Dorothea Greenbaum, Nathaniel Kaz, Augusta Savage, and Carl Walters (ceramics). William Steig and John Held, Jr., both well known as cartoonists and humorists, emerged as sculptors in one-man exhibitions. The work of the following well-known European sculptors was shown in one-man exhibitions in New York galleries: Charles Despiau, Henri Laurens, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Gerhard Marcks and Renée Sintenis.

American museums were particularly rich in sculpture acquisitions in the modern field. As a result of Nazi Germany's ban against modern art, one of the great masterpieces of 20th century sculpture, the famous Kneeling Woman, 1911, by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, of which several copies were made by the sculptor, entered two museums in the United States: New York's Museum of Modern Art acquired the cast-stone version which was formerly accorded a place of honor in the National Gallery in Berlin, and the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, acquired a plaster cast of the same figure which was cast and finished by Lehmbruck himself. The Buffalo museum also acquired Maillol's beautiful figure, Night, and the finest early figure, by the American Gaston Lachaise, the Standing Woman. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the latest and possibly the finest of Despiau's large figures, called Assia; an important group of small sculpture by outstanding moderns; and a stone sculpture, Child with Cat, by William Zorach. The Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art acquired a most important sculpture, the stone relief of St. Cecelia by the Italian Renaissance master, Desiderio da Settignano (1428-1464); and a Madonna and Child by Luca della Robbia (1400-1482). The Frick Collection in New York acquired a terra cotta statue of Diana the Huntress by the famous French sculptor, Jean Antoine Houdon (1741-1828), and there were numerous other acquisitions of ancient, medieval and oriental sculpture by museums throughout the United States.

An interesting competition was sponsored by the Rohm and Haas Company of Philadelphia, which offered three prizes for the best sculptures or constructions in a new plastic called plexiglas. The first prize was won by Alexander Calder, well known for his 'mobiles' (constructions in wire, sheet metal, pipe, etc.), and the second and third prizes by Herbert Matter and Werner Drewes.

United States Government Art Program.

In spite of severe curtailments in the art program of the WPA (Works Projects Administration) during 1939, the WPA and the Section of Fine Arts employed several thousand artists and brought art before an increasingly large public throughout the country.

Through government reorganization both art programs have been brought under one administration, the Federal Works Agency under John Carmody. The WPA art projects were further reorganized at the end of the fiscal year, June 30, 1939, through Congressional action. The WPA Federal Art Project changed its name and its Federal set-up, and became a series of state-wide projects under the title of WPA Art Program. Because of curtailment in WPA funds and also because of the new 18 months' clause which automatically severed from the rolls any project employee who had been working 18 months, the WPA lost a great many artists. The 4,979 persons employed at the beginning of the year were reduced by the fall of 1939 to about 3,000, but by the end of 1939 employment rolls had against passed the 4,000 mark. Although the Federal set-up was changed, the national office of the WPA Art Program is still retained under the direction of Holger Cahill.

Curtailment of the program caused several of the 70 WPA community art centers to be discontinued after Sept. 1st, but during the fall and winter of 1939 the Art Program began an active campaign to extend that part of its plan, particularly in Oregon, Washington, and Montana, and the number of centers rose to 72. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which is the largest so far established, was opened in the first week of January 1940. Over $500,000 in all has been contributed to the art-center program during four years.

In addition to exhibitions circulated by state WPA projects, the national exhibition section has sent out more than 450 complete exhibitions to community art centers and other organizations throughout the country. This constitutes the largest single exhibition program in the history of American art, reaching an estimated twelve to fifteen million people in three and a half years. The most important exhibition of the year was a showing of the Federal Art Project work at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, which was visited by over half a million people in seven months during the period of the Golden Gate International Exposition. One of the largest jobs undertaken by the Art Program, the Aquatic Park in San Francisco, with murals by Hilaire Hiler and sculpture by Beniamino Bufano, was completed during 1939.

Production figures of the WPA Art Program since its inception in 1935 to the end of 1939 are as follows: In the purely creative field, over 1,400 murals installed in public buildings throughout the country; some 50,000 oil paintings and watercolors and 90,000 prints on permanent loan to schools, libraries, hospitals, community centers and other public agencies; some 3,700 sculptures designed for public buildings. Project artists have produced in the allied arts 975 large dioramas and models to be used in schools, 39,125 map drawings and diagrams, 15,300 lantern slides, 52,100 arts and crafts objects, 495,620 documentary photographs, and 850,000 reproductions of posters from 28,000 original designs. The WPA community art-center program has given six million people all over the country some understanding of the significance of art in the life of the community. These large figures show that there has been an active and consistent demand for project work and services. Special emphasis is given to the figures by the fact that since the beginning of the program every project has had to have local sponsorship to the extent that the community has contributed materials, tools, supplies, working space, etc., representing a genuine demand in terms of cash as well as of interest and appreciation.

Several technical projects were carried on by the WPA Art Program. In April 1939 the National Bureau of Standards presented to a meeting of paint manufacturers a commercial standard for artists' oil paints proposed by the Paint Testing and Research Laboratory of the Massachusetts WPA Project, which has been engaged for two and a half years in research, testing, and study of foreign and domestic oil paints. This preliminary standard, the first of its kind ever proposed, was accepted with provisions by the unanimous vote of the manufacturers. The close of the year saw the completion of a 14-page commercial standard covering minimum requirements for color, working quality and durability of artists' oil paints, for presentation to a conference of manufacturers and consumers to be held early in 1940. If approved at this conference, the standard will be accepted by the National Bureau of Standards for publication. The Index of American Design project since 1935 has been compiling a pictorial record of the decorative and folk arts of America. To date this project has produced over 10,000 drawings in color and black and white, several thousand photographs, bibliographies, and other records. A new development this year was the production of a series of color films under a foundation grant to make replicas of the Index available to schools and colleges.

This year the WPA Art Program took over the technical direction of the WPA handicraft program, which employs several thousand persons in practically every state to produce handicraft articles for public institutions. It was felt that these handicraft workers would benefit from the direction of artists trained in design.

The Section of Fine Arts of the Treasury Department, under the direction of Edward Bruce, which was removed this year from the Treasury and placed under the Federal Works Agency, continued to use one per cent of the cost of Federal buildings in expenditures on art to decorate these buildings. The Section held a number of competitions and gave commissions for mural paintings and sculpture for this purpose. The biggest commission so far given by the Section of Fine Arts, a $29,000 job, was awarded this year to two young Chicago painters employed by the WPA, Mitchell Siporin and Edward Millman, for murals for the St. Louis Post Office. The winning designs, which illustrate Missouri and St. Louis history, were chosen by four jurors from the work of 215 competitors.

The mural panels by the well known American artist Maurice Sterne for the Department of Justice building in Washington, which have been in preparation for four and a half years, were completed and were given a preliminary showing in New York City. New murals by Henry Varnum Poor, Ernest Fiene, William Gropper and Nicolai Cikovsky were finished in the new building of the Department of the Interior.

The Section's major exhibition of the year was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. and consisted of winning competition sketches and models from all the states.

Art in Europe.

Europe's tense political situation which for several years past has had its inevitable effect on the art world, culminated in the autumn of 1939 when all activity in art seemed to come to an abrupt halt. The great European museums removed their treasures to underground vaults; many private collectors arranged to have their collections shipped to America. The flight of artists from Europe to America, which has been taking place in increasing numbers in the past few years, grew still more urgent, and various committees have been formed to assist artists to escape wars and dictatorships abroad. There is little doubt that the arts in America will be greatly enriched, to Europe's disadvantage, by the large numbers of European artists who are taking up residence and often citizenship in the United States. Many American expatriates among the artists also have returned to their native land.

During the summer months several important exhibitions were arranged in European cities, proof of the courage of art lovers in the face of threatened turmoil. The greatest of these exhibitions was that of the paintings of Veronese, assembled at Venice in the Palazzo Giustiniani, the third in a series of monumental expositions of the painting of the great Venetians of the High Renaissance (Titian in 1935, Tintoretto in 1937). The Veronese exhibition was of vital importance in its reassertion of the quality of the great painter, and also in the virtual rediscovery of a number of his finest works which were brought out of dark churches and cleaned for the occasion. Besides paintings in Venice, loans for this exhibition came from Paris, Dresden, England and America (five from the last-named).

One outstanding exhibition owed its existence directly to the exigencies of war. Paintings from the great Spanish state collections of the Prado, the Escorial, and the San Fernando Academy, which were saved from destruction in the Spanish civil war, were brilliantly displayed at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva, Switzerland. Early in the war the paintings, tapestries, etc., were removed to the bomb-proof vaults of the Bank of Spain in Madrid. When the Republican Government moved to Valencia, the art followed in the care of a group of curators whose devotion alone is responsible for its preservation. After a number of further moves, the curators appealed to colleagues in London and Paris and money was raised for motor trucks to transport the works of art across the French border, whence they were sent to Geneva to be placed in charge of the League of Nations. The exhibition in Geneva gave an unprecedented opportunity to many to see these works of art which had never before left their relatively remote home. They have since been returned to Spain.

In Florence, Italy, in the Palazzo Medici, works of art of all kinds, manuscripts, etc., which had been collected and commissioned by the Medici family during 300 years were brought together to make an exhibition of unusual interest. In Milan a Leonardo da Vinci celebration took place, in the form of an exhibition of works by the great master and by the artists who came most markedly under his influence. Chiefly because of the scarcity of authentic works of painting and sculpture by Leonardo, this exhibition was more successful in revealing him as architect, engineer, and inventor through actual working models made from his drawings. The Leonardo exhibition led to the discovery in Italy of a painting, Madonna with a Cat, which is supposed to have been painted by Leonardo in 1478 and for which several studies exist. The owner of the painting brought it to Milan where experts called it a work 'by a great Tuscan master of the Renaissance' and hung it in the exhibition.

In London, three centuries of Scottish art were shown at Burlington House, and 50 canvases by Cézanne were assembled to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth. In Belgium, Bruges held an exhibition of the work of the great 15^th century Flemish painter, Hans Memling.

Museum Acquisitions.

American museums were greatly enriched during 1939 by acquisitions of old masters. Of the greatest importance was Samuel H. Kress's gift of his collection to the new National Gallery in Washington, D. C., founded in 1937 through the gift to the nation of Andrew J. Mellon's famous collection. The Kress collection, valued at $30,000,000, consists of 375 paintings including Duccio, Giotto, Simone Martini, Sassetta, Fra Angelico, Piero di Cosimo, Ghirlandaio, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Titian, Giorgione, Tintoretto, and many other great names. The Samuel H. Kress Foundation, established by Mr. Kress in 1929, has donated more than 70 Italian paintings to small American museums and colleges, to which number it added eight more this year given to museums in the South and West.

The Metropolitan Museum in New York acquired a great Tintoretto, the Finding of Moses, dated about 1550-55. Another important acquisition of the year was made by the Rochester (N. Y.) Memorial Art Gallery, the El Greco Vision of St. Dominic. Other acquisitions of note were: a Rembrandt of the 1660's, St. John the Evangelist, and paintings by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Piazetta and Canaletto, by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; a Lorenzo di Credi and Bernardo Daddi, by the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery, Kansas City; a Resurrection by Andrea del Castagno, about 1450, by the Frick Collection, New York; Lazarus and the Rich Man by Jacopo Bassano, by the Cleveland Museum; paintings by Pietro Longhi, Murillo and Henrik Avercamp, by the City Art Museum, St. Louis; On the Terrace, by Pieter de Hooch, by the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design; Portrait of the Duke de la Roca by Goya, a Self Portrait dated 1631 by Rembrandt, and a Van Dyke portrait, by the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery; a portrait by Corneille de Lyon, one of the few examples of the 16th century French painter in America, by the Toledo Museum of Art, which also acquired a Delacroix, Return of Columbus; portrait of Baron von Steuben, by the American Ralph Earl, by the Yale Gallery of Fine Arts; Thomas Eakins's 1908 version of William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, by the Brooklyn Museum. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts received a gift of a collection of 54 paintings, largely of the French Impressionist school, but also containing some early American and English portraits; included are six Renoirs, ten Monets, three Pissarros, Sisley, Degas, Corot, Boudin, Monticelli, and others. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired the greatest picture of Picasso's early period, the Demoiselles d'Avignon 1906-07, Derain's Window on the Park, a Derain and a Matisse sold by German museums, and an important group of early American folk art from the collection of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The Smith College Museum acquired examples by Bonnard, Vuillard, Seurat and the dounaier Rousseau, and a Rousseau also went to the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, purchased from their contemporary art room paintings by Derain, Rouault, de Chirico, Dufy, Chagall, Prendergast and Kuniyoshi. The following are among the museums which acquired examples by living American artists; the Metropolitan Museum (20 paintings); the Whitney Museum (33 works); the Museum of Modern Art; the Pennsylvania Academy (16 works); the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Andover; the Newark Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery; the University of Nebraska; and the Wichita Museum of Art. Additional important museum acquisitions are noted under the heading Sculpture.

Sales.

A number of important art sales took place in 1939. One of America's great private collections of old masters, that of the late Clarence Mackay, was put on the market in New York. At Lucerne, Switzerland, a collection of modern paintings which had occupied places of honor in leading German museums, until the Hitler régime classified them as 'degenerate,' were sold at auction, thus bringing to the market works of a quality and importance such as have not been available since the early part of the century. In New York an outstanding collection of modern works of art, that of the late Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan, was sold at auction. A small part of the William Randolph Hearst collection was dispersed, bringing the sum of $393,796. High prices for the year in New York were $83,000 for a Memling Descent from the Cross, and $60,000 for a tiny painting, Madonna of the Pinks, by Raphael.