1942: Painting And Sculpture

Art and the War.

The unprecedented importance which the Western Hemisphere has assumed in the cultural field as a result of the war was maintained with increasing determination in spite of the encroachments of the war. In the United States, as well as in other American republics, there has been a lively consciousness of the fact that if the art and culture of the Western world are to survive total war they must be kept alive in the Americas. This consciousness has carried with it an implied recognition that art stands high among the ideals of freedom for which the United Nations are fighting. Europe continues to provide examples to illustrate this thesis, both in the occupied countries and in those fighting the Axis.

In the occupied countries there has been physical destruction of the monuments of the past, looting of art treasures, persecution of living artists, and the suppression of all free art expression except in France where the reported continued functioning of a handful of top-flight French modernists, whose art is decidedly unsympathetic to the Hitler regime, suggests an interest on the part of the conquerors in the market prices of such art. (Otto Henkell, Ribbentrop's father-in-law, is said to have paid 40,000 francs for a painting by Picasso.) Reports of the condition of art under the Nazis, however, have been conflicting. From the Low Countries have come many rumors, some indicating early in the year that Dutch and Belgian museums were open and their collections comparatively intact, others that masterpieces from public and private collections were finding their way inevitably into Germany. Nazi authorities in the Netherlands are reported to have set up a state fund for the purpose of assisting artists willing to collaborate with the 'New Order.' Only 'approved' artists are able to obtain canvas and paint. In France, Belgium and the Netherlands Jewish-owned collections have been confiscated and many commercial art galleries are supposedly doing business in the charge of German commissars. Leading Nazis are said to be heavy investors in art. Certain sections of the Louvre in Paris are said to be open to the public but its most valued possessions in painting and sculpture have been in storage far from Paris since the beginning of the war. A report from Moscow late in the year stated that Germany had organized special military units to plunder objects of historical and cultural value in occupied territories.

Artist refugees from Europe continued to arrive in the United States during 1942, most notable among them being Marcel Duchamp, a leading figure of the avant-garde since 1913 when his Nude Descending the Staircase was shown in New York; and Jean Hélion, well-known French painter of the younger generation, who escaped from a prison in Germany and made his way to America. Upon his arrival in June, Duchamp reported that Arp, Brancusi, Braque, Derain, Kandinsky and Picasso were working unmolested in Paris when he left. Rouault is living at Antibes and Matisse at Cimiez, near Nice.

England and Russia have continued to use the talents of artists for propaganda purposes, for morale-building, and for recording the events of the war, Splendid war posters have been produced in these two countries. In England, particularly, the importance of art has been underscored by the continued exhibition and purchase of art by government institutions, by official sponsorship of living artists and by the care with which the art of the past has been protected. Testifying to the power of art in maintaining morale, the National Gallery in London, undamaged by bombing, has been exhibiting one masterpiece at a time, bringing a different one from storage every three weeks. The Minister of Food commissioned mural decorations for restaurants where thousands of workers eat daily. An exhibition of Greek art of fifty centuries, lent by private owners in Great Britain, was opened by the King of Greece at the Royal Academy in London.

In the United States England's example in the uses of the arts in wartime has been closely paralleled, and even extended in some ways. The United States Government art programs (WPA) have employed artists and craftsmen in making the thousands of visual training aids such as charts, diagrams, maps and models which are so urgently needed in the greatly accelerated training of large numbers of men for the armed services — probably the biggest educational program ever undertaken. The armed forces themselves have been interested in using artists, both for recording the war and for technical work. The Navy has appointed six artists to supplement Navy photographers in making visual records of the war. The Marines have appointed one artist for this purpose, and the Army expects to appoint 12 artists from within the service but has not yet done so. The specialized work which artists are performing in the armed forces includes camouflage, the making of medical drawings, and technical tasks in Military Intelligence. The Army Air Force has set up the Historical Unit which plans to employ artists. Before Pearl Harbor the Army instituted the Soldier Art Program, the name of which has recently been changed to the Interior Design Group. This functions in about 60 army camps and air bases and is administered by the office of the Chief of Special Service in Washington, D. C. It employs only artists who are already in the service and are rated as 1B; their function is to decorate mess and recreation halls, to provide a record of the war, and to indoctrinate the soldiers with pride in American military history. There are also a number of independent art projects within the Army, started on the initiative of local commanders and Special Service officers.

In August, shortly after the formation of the government's Office of War Information (OWI), its director, Elmer Davis, announced the organization of the OWI Bureau of Publications and Graphics. Francis E. Brennan, chief of the Graphics Division of the Bureau, issued a statement on the Division's aim 'to intensify and broaden the Government's wartime graphic efforts' and to 'develop plans for practical working relationships with individual artists and art groups.' The Graphics Division was established to coordinate all other government agencies previously producing graphic work. The Division has a two-part program: one, to act as a service agency for 13 or more other government agencies, and two, to carry out by graphic means the OWI campaigns of information. In the first capacity the Division has produced posters and other material for the War Production Board, the Office of Price Administration, the Army, Navy and Marines, the War Manpower Commission, the Departments of Agriculture and of Public Health, etc. Posters for these agencies and also for the OWI campaigns are produced under four main subject-headings: Our Enemies, Our Friends, What We Are Fighting For, and How We Can Get What We Are Fighting For. Among prominent artists whose poster designs are being produced by the OWI are John Atherton, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Edward Millman and Ben Shahn. The Division is also organizing a community graphics program to utilize the voluntary services of graphic specialists of all kinds through local groups all over the country. Plans are under way for expansion of the Division's activities in various other directions.

American artists, like American citizens in general, have shown admirable courage in facing the necessities of war conditions. Naturally, a large number of artists are serving with the armed forces. Many others have entered war industries, where interesting developments have been made in adapting the artist to jobs for which his gifts especially fit him. One such job, in which the artist is uniquely useful, is the making of 'production breakdown illustrations,' perfect perspective drawings devised by the Douglas Aircraft Company, which save thousands of man-hours by entirely eliminating the use of blueprints on the final assembly line. Sculptors are being useful in making the plaster patterns for the dies to form plane parts.

Artists ineligible for active service have shown their eagerness to help fight the war with their own best weapons. They have made countless designs for posters and other illustrative material published by the government; they have contributed their art to benefit exhibitions and sales for all sorts of war-fund raising; they have accepted the task of keeping the stern imperatives of the war vividly before the public; and they have kept up the quality of their work against the odds of futility and despair. In December 1941 11 New York artists' societies united as Artists Societies for National Defense, determined to make their skills available to the government as rapidly as possible. Early in 1942 this developed into Artists for Victory, Inc., a national organization uniting 25 societies, with headquarters in New York. Artists for Victory has sponsored poster competitions and exhibitions and is working to facilitate the use of artists by the government — Federal, state and local.

Inter-American Cultural Relations and Latin-American Art.

Since 1939 the U. S. Government has done much to bring about a cultural interchange between North, Central and South America, with the arts playing an important role. This interchange in the field of art has been accomplished chiefly through the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Nelson A. Rockefeller, and its Committee on Art with the cooperation of a number of United States museums and other organizations. Many Latin-American artists, museum officials and teachers have visited the United States, which in turn has sent artists, lecturers and representatives of major museums to Latin America. Several noteworthy exhibitions of art were exchanged.

The three-sectioned exhibition of contemporary American painting, which was sent on a tour of Latin America in 1941 by the Museum of Modern Art with the cooperation of the other New York museums, returned early in 1942 after 50,000 miles of travel. The exhibition was seen by 218,089 people in 10 cities; the Latin-American press gave it an unprecedented amount of space.

Mexico's three world-famous mural painters, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, were all at work on mural jobs in 1942. The Siqueiros murals in the Escuela República de Mexico in the city of Chillán, Chile, completed in 1942, are among the most important murals in the Western Hemisphere. Rivera and Orozco are both painting walls in Mexico City, Rivera in the National Palace and Orozco in the Temple of Jesus.

American Museums and the War.

If American artists have shown themselves eager to serve, the museums have been equally so. Most of them are seriously short-staffed since directors and curators throughout the country have joined the armed forces. Even before Pearl Harbor many museums had orientated themselves toward assisting our war effort when it was still 'national defense,' and they have since developed programs for specific wartime services to public and government. All major museums report a marked increase in attendance during 1942 (including large numbers of men in uniform), proving what England has already learned — that the public seeks this refuge from the strain of war.

New York's Museum of Modern Art in particular has worked directly for the war government, both officially and unofficially, by preparing, showing and circulating exhibitions and films; the museum staff also acts in an administrative and advisory capacity for many government agencies. Outstanding war exhibition of the year was Road to Victory at the Museum of Modern Art, a collection of dramatically installed enlarged photographs culled from various U. S. Government departments by Lt. Comdr. Edward Steichen, U.S.N.R., with a running text by the poet, Carl Sandburg. Following the New York showing, several editions of this exhibition, which constitutes a heroic portrait of our nation at war, were prepared. One edition has been sent to England under the auspices of the Office of War Information; another edition will go to Honolulu under the same auspices, and a third will tour five United States museums. Two more will go to South American republics, Uruguay and Colombia, which requested the exhibition through the State Department. The Museum of Modern Art also conducted two poster competitions. The United Hemisphere Poster Competition brought in 855 entries, 473 of them from Latin America; about 60 were exhibited and $2,500 was awarded to 17 Latin American and 17 United States and Canadian winners. The National War Poster Competition was sponsored by the Museum, Artists for Victory, Inc. and the Council for Democracy; from 2,224 entries 9 prize winners were selected and 200 posters were exhibited.

Following the lead of a statement signed by prominent museum directors in December 1941, United States museums in general have considered it imperative to keep open, to continue to present the best possible exhibitions and to broaden the scope of their services, which are doubly important to the community in wartime. Several new museums and art collections were established. The Swope Art Gallery, Terre Haute, Ind. opened with an exhibition of contemporary American works of which 23 were purchased; at the University of Arizona an anonymous donor to the Fine Arts Department has started a collection of contemporary American painting which in four years will total 60 works, 12 of which were purchased in 1942. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, established a gallery of contemporary American art for facilitating purchases in that field, 23 of which were announced. The Art Institute of Chicago is devoting a gallery to continuous monthly one-man shows by Chicago artists. The New Britain (Conn.) Institute opened with the announcement of 25 purchases in American art; and the Philadelphia Museum made known its plan to devote 20 new galleries to American art, mainly contemporary. The collection of abstract and surrealist art, chiefly European, made by Miss Peggy Guggenheim was opened to public view in New York under the name, Art of This Century. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, established the American Art Research Council to serve as a central agency for research in the field of American art, in particular relation to problems of authenticity.

One of the great tasks confronting museums in 1942 was safely accomplished — the protection of their collections against possible bombardment. This involved the removal of thousands of works of art from the eastern and western seaboards, chiefly from the National Gallery in Washington, the Metropolitan and Brooklyn Museums in New York and the museums of Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco and San Diego. Most of the old masters went to secret storage places, but many museums inland, such as those at Denver, Colorado Springs, Chicago, Kansas City and Milwaukee, gained a harvest of important loans 'for the duration,' from private collectors as well as museums. Protection of the art remaining in seaboard museums was another problem, met by structural changes in buildings, increased fire precautions, etc.

Museum Exhibitions.

Outstanding exhibitions of the art of the past were not numerous. Chief among them was the Metropolitan Museum's Rembrandt show, consisting of 16 great paintings and a large number of drawings and etchings, all from the Museum's collection. The graphic works especially, gave insight into the great master's art. The Detroit Institution of Arts arranged a fine showing of Buddhist art; and the Philadelphia Museum culled from its own collections a History of Chinese Art, shown there comprehensively for the first time. Marine paintings from the time of Columbus to the present as seen in European and American examples was the subject of another show at Detroit. The Baltimore Museum assembled The Golden Age of the Russian Icon, as well as an exhibition of Venetian painting under the title Giorgione and His Circle. The John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis, offered a chronological survey of the work of our early master, Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828). The Brooklyn Museum presented a contrast between American realism and romanticism in the work of two 19th century painters, William S. Mount (1807-1868) and John Quidor (1801-1881). The Whitney Museum, New York, surveyed the history of American water-color painting, bringing together for the first time much interesting 19th century work. Early American folk or provincial painting was shown in the Whitney's presentation of a large private collection; and in Springfield, Mass., in Somebody's Ancestors, a show featuring several forgotten artists of that region.

The museums' annual salons of contemporary American art were held as usual throughout the country, notable among them being those at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum in New York, the Pennsylvania Academy, and the museums of Cleveland, Denver, Portland (Ore.) and Richmond. One of the few war casualties was Carnegie Institute's famous International, held annually from 1896 to 1939, replaced admirably in 1940 and 1941 by all-American shows, but omitted entirely in 1942. Apart from the annuals, museums showed a tendency to favor the one-man exhibition rather than the group exhibition. Americans 1942 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, inaugurating a series of annuals, combined the two techniques by presenting 18 small one-man shows within the frame of one large exhibition. The Worcester Museum's American show surveyed the eventful decade of 1930-40 in 50 outstanding pictures. The City Art Museum of St. Louis presented Trends in American Painting of Today, and the Dallas Museum, Figure Painting in America. The largest contemporary American exhibition of the year, and probably of all time, opened on Dec. 7 at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, sponsored by Artists for Victory, Inc.

The growing maturity of abstract art in the United States was demonstrated at the Museum of Non-Objective Art (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation) in New York in its fifth anniversary show; and at the Museum of Modern Art, which, with the manufacturer, V'Soske, commissioned Stuart Davis, John Ferren, A. E. Gallatin, Arshile Gorky, Charles Howard, E. McKnight Kauffer, Loren MacIver, George Morris, I. Rice Pereira and Marguerite Zorach to design the 12 handsome rugs shown. The exhibition, Twentieth Century Portraits, also assembled by the Museum of Modern Art, brought together nearly 300 works in various media surveying all phases of modern art in terms of portraiture.

Sculpture.

Sculpture exhibitions were fewer in number than usual because of the increasing difficulty of shipping. The Whitney Museum's annual sculpture show was held, majoring in the work of New York artists. Baltimore showed 26 modern French sculptures which have been marooned in this country since the New York World's Fair in 1939; and gave a one-man show to sculpture and water colors by the dean of American sculptors, William Zorach. The Addison Gallery, Andover, put on an exhibition of modern New England sculpture. John B. Flannagan's one-man show was probably the outstanding one-man sculpture exhibition of the year, and the Museum of Modern Art sent it on a tour of other museums starting in December 1942. Pre-Columbian art of Central America was the subject of a large exhibition, chiefly of sculpture, at the Santa Barbara Museum, which collaborated with the Middle-American Research Institute of Tulane University.

Graphic Arts.

In the graphic arts field the Whitney Museum showed Between Two Wars, an exhibition of prints done from 1914 to 1941. The Metropolitan Museum selected and showed Civil War subjects from the many woodcuts which Winslow Homer did for Harper's Weekly, for which he was a special correspondent at the front. The Boston Museum showed the drypoint etchings of Mary Cassatt (1845-1926), American expatriate who exhibited with the French Impressionists. The U. S. National Museum gave a showing to prints by Pop Hart, globe-trotting American artist who died in 1933.

Dealers' and Other Exhibitions of Interest.

Two remarkable exhibitions of the art of the Low Countries were organized at dealers' galleries, both benefit performances, as were many of the important shows of the year. One was the Dutch show of some 70 paintings, including 15 Rembrandts, 15 Hals, examples by Vermeer, etc. This was the largest Dutch show in America since 1908 and was of fine quality. The other outstanding exhibition was of Flemish painting of the 15th and early 16th centuries. A large show of paintings by Corot and a small but well-selected group of paintings by Cézanne were also presented.

United States Government Art Programs.

The WPA Art Program, which was established in August 1935 as the Federal Art Project, and which since September 1939 has been composed of a series of state-wide art projects under the Work Projects Administrations in 41 states, the District of Columbia, New York City and Southern California, will be liquidated before the close of the government's fiscal year, June 30, 1943. Projects in 20 states will close officially as of Feb. 1, 1943; all others will close during February and March. All works of art produced by the projects will be allocated to Federal, state and municipal tax-supported institutions.

The Index of American Design, the vast compendium of documented, handmade color plates which constitutes the greatest pictorial repository of American decorative, domestic, popular and folk arts, has been one of the most valuable contributions of the WPA Art Program. This unique collection of 22,414 plates, exclusive of several thousand photographic records, was deposited in the summer of 1942 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which will act as custodian.

During 1942 two important mural projects begun several years ago by the WPA Art Program were completed: James Brooks' Flight at LaGuardia Airport, New York, and Edward Laning's Story of the Recorded Word at the New York Public Library.

The Section of Fine Arts of the Public Buildings Administration, under the direction of Edward Bruce and Edward B. Rowan, continued its program of commissioning artists, largely through competitions, to decorate Federal buildings with mural paintings and sculpture. The largest commission ever given by the Section was completed in 1942 after two years' work. This was the History of Missouri in the St. Louis Post Office, a series of large fresco panels by Mitchell Siporin and Edward Millman. The second largest commission given by the Section, 27 mural panels for the Rincon Annex of the San Francisco Post Office is being painted by Anton Refregier.

Museum Acquisitions.

When the National Gallery in Washington, D. C., opened in 1941, it contained the Andrew W. Mellon and the Samuel H. Kress collections of old masters, as well as several smaller gifts of works of art. In 1940 announcement was made of the gift of the famous Widener collection to the National Gallery. This collection would have taken its place in Washington when the Gallery opened, but the gift-tax law of Pennsylvania required the payment of $195,000, for which there were no funds available. In 1942 President Roosevelt recommended to Congress the payment of the tax and the $50,000,000 Widener collection thus became the property of the nation. The Widener collection was one of the first great collections in the United States. It was begun many years ago by Peter A. B. Widener; Joseph E. Widener, the donor, continued to build up the collection after his father's death in 1915. Superlative examples of the art of Italian, Dutch, Flemish and English masters make up the painting and sculpture sections of the collection, which also contains tapestries, furniture, ceramics, jewels and other objects of Medieval and Renaissance art. Among the most celebrated paintings in the collection are The Mill by Rembrandt, Raphael's Small Cowper Madonna and Giovanni Bellini's Feast of the Gods. The new galleries containing the Widener collection were officially opened on Dec. 20.

Chester Dale, noted New York collector, again enriched the National Gallery with an impressive 'indefinite loan' of 41 19th century French paintings, rounding out the group of 25 lent the previous year. Artists represented are Cézanne (5 paintings), Corot, Courbet, Daumier, Delacroix, Gauguin (3), van Gogh (3), Manet, Renoir, Rousseau, Toulouse-Lautrec and others. The Gallery also received a Goya portrait from the Havemeyer collection, a painting by Chardin, and two paintings of his English period by Copley.

In March on the first anniversary of its opening to the public, slightly over 2,000,000 people had visited the National Gallery. On Sunday the attendance has sometimes been as high as 23,000.

The Joslyn Memorial in Omaha, Neb., has started to form a promising collection of old masters. Its most important acquisition was a famous painting by Titian, Man with a Falcon, which has passed through several princely collections in Europe. Omaha also acquired paintings by Veronese, Lorenzo de Credi, Rembrandt and Van Dyck. New York's Metropolitan Museum acquired an important Velasquez portrait, Cardinal Don Gaspar Borja y Velasco, painted about 1643. This was the first example of the mature style of Velasquez to enter the Metropolitan. The San Diego Fine Arts Gallery acquired a Titian portrait, and a painting known as the Terris portrait by the rare Giorgione. Princeton University's museum acquired a small but fine Tintoretto; the Detroit Institute, a portrait by Bronzino; the Minneapolis Institute, a 17th century Dutch landscape by Hobbema. Two Gilbert Stuart portraits went to the Rochester (N. Y.) Art Gallery; a Copley portrait of 1771 to the Addison Gallery, Andover; and two Copleys and a Mary Cassatt to the Boston Museum. Vassar College received 167 old-master prints from the Felix M. Warburg collection.

In the field of modern art the Art Institute of Chicago received important works from the McCormick collection, including nine paintings by Cézanne and examples by Degas, Derain, Duty, Modigliani, Picasso and Utrillo. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired Departure, an important large work by Max Beckmann, distinguished German modernist; Hide and Seek, the major work by Pavel Tchelitchew; three important cubist works by Picasso and Braque; and a large number of other European and American paintings, sculptures and prints. Paintings from the Havemeyer collection went to the Brooklyn Museum, including works by Cézanne, Corot, Courbet and Monet. The late Christian Brinton, noted art collector and writer, bequeathed his unique collection of Slavic art to the Philadelphia Museum. Dr. Brinton began buying the contemporary arts of Scandinavia, Central Europe and Russia in 1920; Russian art greatly predominates in the collection.

Notable museum acquisitions in the field of sculpture during the year were a 16th century bronze fountain by German Pilon which went to the Boston Museum; the Rape of Europa by Jacques Lipchitz, contemporary French sculptor, and the Head of Christ by William Zorach, living American, which went to the Museum of Modern Art; and a recent heroic female figure by Zorach which was purchased by the new Swope Art Gallery, Terre Haute, Ind.

Sales.

Dr. Albert C. Barnes, owner of one of the greatest collections of modern art housed at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa., purchased Renoir's Mussel Fishers at Berneval (1879) for $175,000, the second highest price ever paid for a Renoir. The Barnes collection already contains over 135 paintings by Renoir. One of the most extraordinary art sales ever made was negotiated by Gimbel Bros.; an anonymous purchaser paid $19,000 for a Spanish monastery in the William Randolph Hearst collection. This monastery of the Cistercian Order, built in the late 12th century by Alfonso VII of Castile, was bought by Hearst in Spain in 1923, taken to pieces, packed in 10,500 cases and shipped to the United States at a cost of half a million.

1941: Painting And Sculpture

Art and the War.

In the two and a half years since the beginning of the war in September 1939 the Western Hemisphere, which formerly looked respectfully to Europe for leadership, has become virtually the stronghold of world art. Through tragic events in Europe the future of Western art for some years to come undoubtedly rests to a large extent with the 21 American republics. Now, with the entry of the United States into the war, many questions arise. What will America do with this responsibility toward the arts; can we keep our living art alive during years of war; can we care for and use the harvest of artistic talents which has been brought to our shores from Europe?

The destructive effect of total war upon art — both the art of the past and the art of living practising artists — has been illustrated in Europe in the war years, increasingly in 1941. One of the most distressing problems has been that of artists who have had to flee their native lands. The plight of many of the refugee artists who have arrived in the United States has been acute. Others, still attempting to leave Europe, are in serious danger. The President's Advisory Committee for Political and Intellectual Refugees, the Emergency Rescue Committee in New York, and many other committees throughout the country have continued to bring refugees, among them artists, out of Europe. During 1941 the distinguished modern artists, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, André Masson, André Breton, Moise Kisling and Ossip Zadkine, arrived in the United States from France. In France, still awaiting papers and passage to America at the end of the year, were Hans Arp, Pierre Roy, Vassily Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp. Of other famous French artists Henri Matisse, Aristide Maillol, Charles Despiau, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Jean Lurçat and Raoul Dufy are said to be working quietly in Unoccupied France; while in Paris Picasso, Georges Braque, André Derain, Georges Rouault and Maurice de Vlaminck are said to continue active, although many art materials are unobtainable. The well-known Expressionist painters, the German Max Beckmann and the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, are working, respectively, in Amsterdam and London, the latter reportedly seeking passage to the United States.

But in spite of the tragic difficulties of European artists, it must be noted that the major warring countries of Europe, with the possible exception of France, have turned to art, not only for propaganda purposes, but also for morale building and recreational purposes. However, only Great Britain has given the artist the freedom which is a necessary ingredient of great art. The others have imposed censorship and restrictions which go beyond subject matter and ideology and serve seriously to limit the technical and expressive freedom of the artist.

Since 1939 British artists have been employed by the Government to record the war at home and abroad. An exhibition, Britain at War, consisting of paintings and drawings which resulted from this official employment of British artists was sent to the United States for exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Following this it was shown at the National Gallery of Canada at Ottawa and the Art Gallery of Toronto, Canada, and then started a tour of the United States. The British Ministry of Information sent over an exhibition, The Great Fire of London, 1940, consisting of 107 paintings and drawings made by artist-members of the Auxiliary Fire Service. This exhibition opened at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., was shown at the Museum of the City of New York, and then started on a tour of Canada and the United States. Early in 1941 the American British Art Center opened in New York, its stated purpose being to encourage British artists in war time. The Center's initial show included the work of a number of English artists and starred the distinguished older painter, Walter Sickert.

During 1941 England has also been interested in propagandizing American art in England by means of photographs, publications, etc. An unofficial representative of the British Government came to the United States to study and report on the U. S. Government Art Programs.

The present whereabouts of works of art owned by great European museums has in general remained a mystery. The contents of the Louvre and other French museums and of the British museums are supposedly safely stored. There have been many rumors, particularly from the Low Countries, that the contents of Dutch and Belgian museums are appearing in increasing numbers in German public and private collections. It has also been rumored that in spite of the official Nazi ban on 'degenerate art,' a term applied by Hitler to the most creative art movements of the 20th century, German army officers in Paris are showing a paradoxical interest in buying up modern French art.

For some months before the actual outbreak of war between the United States and Japan, American museums officials had been concerned with plans for the protection of the works of art in their custody. Two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor museum directors from a number of cities met in New York to pool their knowledge and formulate a plan for the future of their institutions in war time. At this meeting the directors of six major American museums, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Frick Collection in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Art Institute of Chicago, signed a statement which emphasized the museums' readiness to meet the situation. 'If, in time of peace, our museums are important to the community, in time of war they are doubly valuable.... Our Allies, Great Britain and her Dominions, under the destructive impact of total war, have already shown that art as an expression of the higher values of life is an undeniable factor in a free people's resistance. Never before has museum attendance been so great in Canada, or in England wherever museums can still function....' The statement contained resolutions that American museums would continue to keep their doors open and would broaden the scope and variety of their work, since 'no better time could be found to make more effective the public services of our museums.'

American artists have shown their eagerness to make their special talents available to their government in its war effort. In December 1941 eleven New York artists' societies united under the name of Artists Societies for National Defense and held a mass meeting to discuss the possible usefulness of the artist in national and civilian defense.

American Museum Events.

One of the most impressive events in the history of American art was the opening in March 1941 of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., with a formal dedication and a memorable speech of acceptance by President Roosevelt. The Andrew W. Mellon collection, with provision for a building to house it, was deeded to the nation in 1937. To this was added in 1939 the gift of a large part of his collection by Samuel H. Kress, chain store magnate, and a collection of some 300 fine prints was given by Eilen T. Bullard and three anonymous donors. In 1940 announcement was made by P. A. B. Widener II of the gift to the National Gallery of Philadelphia's famous Widener collection, but the collection was not included when the Gallery opened nor has its presentation date yet been specified.

Italian Renaissance works comprise over five-sixths of the National Gallery collection. The Mellon collection numbers 126 paintings and 26 sculptures, 60 belonging to the Italian schools; the Kress collection of 375 paintings and 18 sculptures, with an additional group of 43 paintings and 22 sculptures on loan, are all Italian. Fine examples of Flemish and Dutch paintings are included in the Mellon collection, and the English 18th century is also represented. Among the Italian masterpieces are the Giotto Madonna and Child, the Duccio Calling of Peter and Andrew, the Sasetta St. Anthony and St. Paul, the Botticelli Adoration of the Magi, St. Jerome by Mantegna, The Crucifixion by Perugino, St. George and the Dragon and the Niccolini-Cowper Madonna by Raphael, the Adoration of the Shepherds by Giorgione, Venus with a Mirror by Titian, and superb sculptures by Donatello, Desiderio da Settignano, Verrocchio and others. Although the North European Schools are represented by few examples they are of extraordinary quality; chief among them being the Jan van Eyck Annunciation, the Memling Madonna and Child with Angels, the Rogier van der Weyden Portrait of a Lady and Christ Appearing to the Virgin, and the Gerard David Rest on the Flight into Egypt. Vermeer, Holbein, Rembrandt and Rubens are also notably represented.

Late in 1941 the National Gallery announced the loan for an indefinite period of 25 important French paintings from the Chester Dale collection in New York. These 25 canvases were selected to trace briefly the whole development of French painting through the great 19th century, a period scarcely touched upon in the National Gallery collections. Among the artists represented are David, Delacroix, Degas, Corot, Courbet, Manet, Pissarro, Renoir and Cézanne. Another important loan of seven 19th century paintings, further strengthening the French and American sections, came from the Harris Whittemore Collection of Naugatuck, Conn.; namely, two canvases by Degas, two by Renoir, and three by Whistler, including his famous White Girl of 1862. The National Gallery received also a gift from the Duncan Phillips Collection in Washington of Daumier's powerful painting, Advice to a Young Artist.

The National Gallery proved a tremendous popular success, 301,342 visitors entering the $15,000,000 neoclassic building during the first month that it was open.

Second only in prominence to the opening of the National Gallery of Art was the installation in 20 new galleries in the Philadelphia Museum of Art of the justly famous John G. Johnson collection, providing the first opportunity to see this vast collection of nearly 600 works in its entirety. Johnson started collecting in the late 1880's and continued until he died in 1917, leaving his collection to the City of Philadelphia. The extraordinary taste of the great American amateur of early European painting is here revealed, particularly in the field of Flemish and early Italian painting, although the collection extends also to French, English and American works of the 18th and 19th centuries. Two of the greatest Flemish primitives in the world are in the Johnson collection: St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata by Jan van Eyck and the Virgin and St. John by Rogier van der Weyden.

New art museums were opened during the year in Santa Barbara, Calif., and in West Palm Beach, Fla., the latter being a private collection of painting and sculpture with an art gallery and school donated to the town by Ralph H. Norton of Chicago. New York's oldest surviving art institution, though not its first, the National Academy, founded in 1825, acquired its first permanent home in 1941, a Fifth Avenue mansion presented by Archer M. Huntington. The Academy's permanent collection was installed in this building and it was opened to the public.

Museum Exhibitions.

In 1941 there was a dearth of old master exhibitions throughout the United States, the chief opportunities for study in this field being concentrated in the National Gallery of Art and in the Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

French art since the Revolution made several brilliant appearances during the year. A large group of paintings and drawings from the Louvre and other museums in France, which had originally been sent to Argentina for exhibition and safe-keeping in the early months of the war, arrived in the United States. Augmented by the loan of about 50 important works from American collections, this splendid group, chiefly of the 19th century, was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York under the title David to Toulouse-Lautrec. These distinguished refugee pictures from France were also shown in San Francisco at the M. H. De Young Memorial Museum and at the Portland (Ore.) Art Museum, augmented by loans from local sources.

One of the outstanding museum exhibitions of the year was the full-length showing of the work of Goya at the Art Institute of Chicago. The largest and most carefully selected exhibition by the great Spanish painter (1746-1828) ever assembled in America, the show contained 163 paintings, drawings and prints. Rivaling this exhibition in the field of Spanish art was the Toledo Museum's splendid Art of Old Spain, 60 paintings covering a period of six centuries and augmented by a series of rare 12th century frescoes. An ambitious subject was chosen by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in its exhibition, Forty-five Centuries of Portraiture.

One of the season's most distinguished exhibitions was the Renoir centennial (1841-1919) held, not in a museum, but at the New York gallery of an art dealer for the benefit of the Free French Relief Committee. With 86 American-owned canvases included, this was the most extensive Renoir exhibition ever assembled in America, rivaled only by that held in Paris in 1933. The great French impressionist painted through virtually six decades, leaving the richest output of any modern master. The large number of his works in America, among them some superb examples, made possible an impressive gathering. The work of another impressionist painter, the Pittsburgh-born expatriate, Mary Cassatt (1845-1926), who lived most of her life in France, was the subject of an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The Boston Museum exhibited the fruits of a remarkable discovery made in England in 1940 — 29 illustrations for Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, drawn by the English poet-painter, William Blake (1757-1827). The existence of these illustrations was unsuspected by Blake authorities and they were discovered by accident by Geoffrey Keynes in the library of the Marquis of Crewe. The romantic paintings of Thomas Cole (1801-1848), English-born founder of America's Hudson River School, were brought together for the first time at the Albany Institute of History and Art.

The art of the 20th century, both European and American, was vigorously represented in United States museums, both in temporary and in permanent exhibitions. The Museum of Modern Art in New York announced a permanent, though constantly changing, exhibition of modern painting and sculpture from its own collection, unequaled in this field in the United States. Several one-man exhibitions, outstanding for the painstaking care with which they were presented, may be noted. The great Picasso exhibition, assembled and shown by the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1939, and in 1940 sent on a tour of major cities in the United States, was shown in 1941 at the Isaac Delgado Museum, New Orleans, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, N. Y., and Duke University, Durham, N. C. Guernica, Picasso's great painting of 1937, made in outraged protest against the bombing of that Spanish town during the civil war, was included in the first three of these showings, and was then shown alone at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, and at the Columbus (Ohio) Gallery of Fine Art. The retrospective showing of some 80 paintings by Georges Rouault, veteran French modernist, which was organized late in 1940 and shown in Boston and Washington, was shown this year at the San Francisco Museum of Art. A large mural decoration, Composition with Two Parrots (1935-39) by Fernand Léger, noted French painter now living in the United States, was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and at the San Francisco Museum of Art. The Museum of Modern Art gave one-man exhibitions to two contemporary Spanish painters, Joan Miro, whose art is fantastic and abstract in character, and Salvador Dali, widely publicized surrealist. This museum also held a memorial exhibition of paintings by the Swiss, Paul Klee, early modernist leader in Germany, who died in 1940; and a show of paintings and drawings by George Grosz, German-American satirist.

The Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., collection of European avant garde painting, sculpture and drawings, chiefly School of Paris and numbering 341 items, was placed on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts at Richmond, and was shown later at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This collection contains about 90 works by Picasso. The Worcester (Mass.) Art Museum arranged a French exhibition called The Art of the Third Republic (1870-1940); and the Los Angeles Museum one entitled Cézanne to Picasso.

Contemporary American art as usual dominated the scene in the museums. Large comprehensive annuals and biennials went on as heretofore at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and at museums and art galleries in Toledo, Los Angeles, Colorado Springs, San Diego, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Richmond and many other cities. Several new annuals appeared upon the scene, among them a show of drawings by American painters at the Albany Institute of History and Art, inaugurating a series devoted to modern drawings. Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, for the second year forced because of the war to abandon its famous international annual, organized Directions in American Painting, an exhibition of 302 paintings chosen by a jury from nearly 5,000 submissions by artists who had never before exhibited at Carnegie. This plan was calculated to tap a wealth of obscure talent among the younger Americans; however, a certain amount of adverse criticism of the undertaking suggested that the jury had not been sufficiently adventurous in its choices. Two stimulating exhibitions held at the Whitney Museum in New York were This Is Our City, the work of New York painters from the 'ash-can school' of The Eight in 1908 through the present day; and Artists under Forty, containing the recent work of painters and sculptors throughout the country. The Riverside Museum in New York gave an opportunity to exhibit to a number of artists' societies, among them the American Abstract Artists, a New York group; the Chicago Society of Artists; and the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, a group of New York artists who seceded in 1940 from the American Artists Congress.

Off the beaten track of professional art were two exhibitions held, respectively, at the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. These were They Taught Themselves, displaying the work of many of the so-called 'primitives' or naive painters of our day, such as Joseph Pickett, Patrick Sullivan, Morris Hirshfield, Patsy Santo, and John Kane, who have enjoyed much popular favor in the last half-dozen years; and the Art of Children in New York City.

Retrospective one-man shows of character and interest were held at the Boston Institute of Modern Art by Eugene Berman, Russian-born neo-romantic painter who recently became an American citizen; at the Chicago Art Institute, by Peppino Mangravite, well-known American painter and teacher; at the Museum of Non-Objective Art in New York, by Ladislaus Moholy-Nagy, Hungarian painter, constructivist, photographer and theorist now living in the United States. The Whitney Museum held memorial exhibitions for two American painters who died in 1940, Jerome Myers and Emil Ganso.

One of the most significant exhibitions in the field of primitive arts ever held, and surely the most elaborate installation ever accorded this material, was the Indian Art of the United States arranged at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This exhibition, under the direction of René d'Harnoncourt, was the result of a collaboration between the Museum and the Indian Arts and Crafts Board of the U. S. Department of the Interior. Brilliant insight in the selection of the objects, which represented American Indian culture in every phase from prehistoric times to the present day, as well as the dramatic presentation, served to reveal the true stature of Indian artists and craftsmen who until now have seldom been considered the artistic equal of their kinsmen of Central America. Another splendid undertaking, in a field apparently never before exploited for museum exhibition, was the Brooklyn (N.Y.) Museum's Coptic Art of Egypt. The 1st to the 10th century ad in Egypt was here demonstrated, particularly in sculpture and textiles, but also in paintings and various decorative arts. At the Metropolitan Museum in New York an informative exhibition was arranged around the theme The China Trade and Its Influences. The Baltimore Museum of Art tapped local sources for a varied and stimulating show called A Century of Baltimore Collecting. Two great Baltimore collections formed the backbone of this exhibition, the Walters Art Gallery, one of the richest private collections majoring in medieval art, and the Cone Collection of 20th century art.

The first comprehensive exhibition of Australian art to be seen here opened late in the year at the National Gallery of Art in Washington under the auspices of the Carnegie Corporation. Lent by Australian museums, collectors and artists, the 75 pictures range from aboriginal drawings on bark (of very great interest) to contemporary work. This exhibition was later shown at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and then sent on a tour of Canada and the United States by the Museum of Modern Art. (For Britain at War and additional exhibitions see sections Art and the War and Sculpture.)

Sculpture.

The field of sculpture was somewhat less active during 1941 than during the preceding three years when large U. S. Government commissions and the New York and San Francisco expositions provided unusual opportunities for monumental sculpture. Government commissions continued, however, and the WPA Art Program continued to employ sculptors for public work. Major WPA job completed during the year was a monumental series of low reliefs in Indiana limestone, entitled The Legend of California, by Donal Hord, one of the most distinguished sculptors working west of the Rockies. These stone panels are installed on the facade of the high school library at Coronado, Calif.

The major all-sculpture exhibition occurring annually is that held by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and this survey of recent American work was held as usual in 1941. The Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh held a sculpture show representing 81 artists; this was a selection from the vast international sculpture exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art the year before. One-man sculpture exhibitions were rather few both in museums and in dealers' galleries. The comprehensive exhibition of about 30 works by the robust Swedish-American, Carl Milles, organized and shown at the Baltimore Museum late in 1940, went in 1941 to the Boston Institute of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Alfeo Faggi, Italian-born American known particularly for his distinguished treatment of religious subjects, was given a large retrospective exhibition of 37 sculptures and 50 drawings at the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y. The following living American sculptors had one-man shows in New York dealers' galleries: Leo Amino, Eleanor Boudin, José de Creeft, William Ehrich, Robert Laurent, Louise Nevelson, John Rood, Fingal Rosenquist, Challis Walker, Nat Werner and Harry Wickey. Europeans who had one-man shows in New York were Henri Laurens, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Aristide Maillol, Carl Milles and Ossip Zadkine. Two general sculpture exhibitions of value were arranged by a New York dealer, From Rodin to Brancusi and American Sculpture Today.

An important collection of early Christian, Romanesque and Gothic art, chiefly sculpture, assembled by the late George Grey Barnard, distinguished American sculptor, was placed on the market, and exhibited at the Old Cloisters in New York, in order to raise funds to finance the Rainbow Arch for which Barnard was designing sculpture at the time of his death. This second group of 262 items was assembled after Barnard's first collection of this material had been purchased for the Metropolitan Museum (now on view at the new Cloisters building in New York).

The Philadelphia sculpture show, mentioned above, was designed to aid in the selection of sculptors to execute commissions for the second series of Fairmount Park monuments comprising the Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial. The winners of these coveted commissions were announced in 1941: Erwin F. Frey of Ohio, Henry Kreis of Connecticut, Harry Rosin of Philadelphia, and Wheeler Williams of New York. Carl Milles' first work for a public building in New York was unveiled in 1941 in the lobby of the Time and Life Building in Rockefeller Center. Entitled Man and Nature, it is a wood carving, 11 feet high and placed at considerable height on the wall, representing a woodsman on horseback flanked by figures of a nymph and a faun. Following a precedent set last year at Pennsylvania State College when the Class of 1932 commissioned Henry Varnum Poor to paint frescoes there, the Class of 1940 has commissioned Heinz Warneke, American sculptor, to carve for the college a Lion in Indian limestone. Warneke will work on the campus, as did Poor, where students may study the work in progress.

The most important museum acquisitions in the field of sculpture this year were a Praxitelean Greek head of about 320 bc by the City Art Museum of St. Louis; Maillol's Venus on which the great French artist worked from 1918 to 1933; and a life-size marble group called Youth by William Zorach, leading American sculptor, by the Norton Gallery and School of Art, West Palm Beach, Fla.

Exhibitions in Dealers' Galleries.

The magnificent Renoir exhibition already mentioned (see section Museum Exhibitions) was the outstanding dealer show of the year. Also of interest was an El Greco exhibition of 25 paintings, marking the 400th anniversary of the birth of the great Spanish painter and held for the benefit of Greek War Relief. Twentieth century European art as usual was widely exhibited in the galleries; one exhibition to be especially noted was Les Fauves, 31 paintings dating from 1905 to 1908 by the 'wild beasts' Matisse, Dufy, Derain, Friesz, Vlaminck, Braque, van Dongen, Marquet and Manguin.

United States Government Art Programs.

The WPA Art Program and the Section of Fine Arts of the Public Buildings Administration, both of which are under the Federal Works Agency, continued to function during 1941, employing several thousand artists and doing more than any other agency in this country or in the world to support art and bring it to an increasingly large public. These agencies also brought art and art activity to the United States' armed forces to a greater extent than all other agencies combined (see below).

The WPA Art Program, which since its establishment in August 1935 as the Federal Art Project has employed between 3,000 and 5,500 needy painters, sculptors, art teachers, technical and research workers, model, map and poster makers and camouflage experts for the benefit of the American public, had, during 1941, 44 state-wide art projects in 41 states and the District of Columbia, New York City and Southern California, the last three being separate administrations. The state-wide projects operate under the various state Work Projects Administrations. The national office of the WPA Art Program in Washington, D.C., has been continued under the direction of Holger Cahill, with a National Exhibition Section which selected and sent on tour during 1941 more than 200 exhibitions, a great many of these organized for military camps and industrial defense areas.

Production figures for the WPA Art Program as of October 1941 show that since 1935 it has produced for public tax-supported institutions, such as schools, hospitals, libraries, airports and housing projects, over 2,250 murals including frescoes, mosaics and photomurals. Also completed were over 85,151 paintings which have been allocated on permanent loan to public institutions. Unallocated project work is being circulated by the National Exhibition Section in Washington, D. C. In sculpture some 13,198 works for public buildings have been produced, ranging from small ceramic figures for public schools and libraries to monuments for parks, housing developments and historic battlefields. In the graphic arts a total of 239,727 fine prints from 12,581 original designs have been completed; and over 2,000,000 posters from 30,500 designs have been printed for purposes such as public health and safety campaigns, concerts, art exhibitions, and during 1941 for military and civilian defense activities. Thousands of maps, diagrams, documentary photographs, lantern slides, dioramas and models, and other types of visual aids, and 52,100 crafts objects, all of specific value to educational and other public agencies, have been produced by Art Program employees. In the making of dioramas and models particularly, the Program has created material which would not otherwise have been available to public schools and other educational institutions.

One of the most constructive phases of the Art Program has been the establishment and maintenance, with community support, of a chain of community art centers in parts of the country not already served by museums or other art organizations. This part of the Program was extended in 1940 and 1941 in spite of reduction of funds for the WPA as a whole effected by Congressional action. At the close of 1941, 100 community art centers were in operation in Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, New York City, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wyoming and the District of Columbia. During six years more than 8,000,000 people have participated in the activities promoted by the centers. These activities, all free to both children and adults, stress active participation rather than passive appreciation. They include art exhibitions, art classes, lectures, demonstrations of art processes, and crafts workshops. The fact that American communities feel a strong desire for these activities is evidenced by the extent of popular support. The community art centers have received sponsorship from state and municipal governments, art and educational associations, Chambers of Commerce, Rotary Clubs, women's clubs, the American Legion, and school children. About $1,000,000 has been contributed to these centers by the communities involved during the past six years.

The Index of American Design, the great compendium of documented handmade color plates illustrating with utmost accuracy the history of the decorative arts in America, has continued to be one of the most valuable contributions made by the WPA Art Program. During 1941 the Index was carried on in 32 states. Extensively exhibited throughout the country, Index plates have attracted enthusiastic interest on the part of public and designers. The Index was exhibited in 1941 at the President's Library at Hyde Park, the Worcester Art Museum, Dartmouth College, and many other institutions.

The most important development on the WPA Art Program in 1941 was the organization of its services for national defense. Eighty per cent of the production activities of the Program were devoted to work for the armed services and civilian defense organizations. This work has included such certified projects as the Massachusetts Passive Defense Project, sponsored by the U. S. War Department, which has carried on technical research and experiments relative to camouflage and blackout activity; and the Illinois Project for Technical Training Aids, also sponsored by the War Department, which has prepared diagrammatic charts of airplane motors for use in U. S. Army Air Corps training schools. It has also included such work as the production of posters for air raid precautions, morale building, health and labor relations; the making of scale models, charts, maps, and lantern slides for training purposes; the making of specially constructed articles and equipment for use by the armed forces, such as portable medical cabinets, parachute tables and racks, code practising tables, photograph storage cabinets, portable altars, air raid precaution armbands and other insignia; mural decorations and furnishings for recreation halls and service clubs. The Art Program has also furnished instructors for recreational art classes in camps, one outstanding example being the very successful classes at Fort Custer, Mich. The WPA community art centers, particularly in Florida, Oklahoma and Washington, have been active with recreational programs for service men. Of the several hundred national defense organizations served by the WPA Art Program during the past year a few of the most important are Alameda Naval Air Base, Fort Ord and Daughtery Air Field, Calif.; Fort Logan, Colo.; Camp Blanding and Pensacola Naval Air Base, Fla.; Chanute Field, Ill.; Fort Custer, Mich.; Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.; Tongue Point Naval Air Base, Ore.; Indiantown Gap Reservation, Pa.; Fort Douglas, Utah; Fort Belvoir, Va.; Fort Lewis and Sand Point Naval Air Base, Wash.

The Section of Fine Arts of the Public Buildings Administration has continued its program, under the direction of Edward Bruce, of commissioning artists to decorate Federal buildings with mural paintings and sculpture. Figures given at the end of the fiscal year, June 30, 1941, show that since October 1934 the section has held 166 competitions, and has commissioned 1,057 mural and sculpture decorations which have been completed in 903 cities at a total cost of $1,377,812. Many other commissions, as yet uncompleted, have been given out. The majority of the competitions held have been restricted to artists living in the state in which the building to be decorated is located, but for exceptionally important projects such as new Federal buildings in the District of Columbia and the St. Louis and San Francisco Post Offices, the competitions have been national in scope. Largest commission in 1941, and second largest ever given by the Section, was won by Anton Refregier of New York through national competition: $26,000 for 27 mural panels for the Rincon Annex of the San Francisco Post Office.

In addition to its program of decorating Federal buildings, the Section of Fine Arts has held several competitions for the purchase of watercolors and drawings for use by various Government agencies. In December 1941, after Pearl Harbor, the Office for Emergency Management in collaboration with the Section of Fine Arts, initiated a national competition for pictures which would inform the public about war and defense activities. The sum of $2,400 will be spent to purchase about 100 watercolors, drawings and prints from the competition, which then will be exhibited throughout the country.

Cultural Relations with Latin America.

During the past three years the United States Government has indicated its belief that one way of furthering accord in the Western Hemisphere is by bringing before the public of both North and South America the cultural achievements of the 21 American republics. The President's Office of Emergency Management, through the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (Nelson A. Rockefeller), has been concerned for the past two years with this interchange of culture between the United States and Latin America. In October 1941 the Department of State announced that the President had approved the appointment of an Advisory Committee on Art, to advise the Department of State through the Division of Cultural Relations regarding the stimulation of artistic interchange among the American republics and the coordination of activities in this country which concern inter-American art.

One of the largest cultural projects carried out during 1941, through the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs with the cooperation of five New York museums, was the organization of three large exhibitions of contemporary American paintings to tour South and Central America for six months. The cooperating museums, from whose collections the exhibitions were in large part selected, were the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History. The three exhibitions opened in June in Mexico City, Bogota and Buenos Aires, and were shown later in Havana, Caracas, Quito, Lima, Santiago, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro. A handsome illustrated catalogue in three languages accompanied the exhibitions, which in general were favorably received. In the spring of 1941 another large exhibition from the United States started a tour of 16 cities in South and Central America, opening in Rio de Janeiro. This was called Contemporary Art of the Western Hemisphere, the International Business Machines Corporation's collection of paintings and prints, representing every nation of the Hemisphere, which had been shown at the San Francisco and New York expositions.

Among the larger exhibitions of Latin American art held in American museums was that at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, arranged in cooperation with the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. This was America South of the Border, an important showing of colonial and folk art from all the Latin American countries. The Boston Institute of Modern Art organized an exhibition called Modern Mexican Painters, to be shown also at the Phillips Memorial Gallery, Washington, and museums in Cleveland, Portland (Ore.), San Francisco and Santa Barbara. This exhibition emphasized younger artists and should do much to counteract the impression that monumental fresco is the sum total of the Mexican painter's achievement. Maria Martins, well known Brazilian sculptor, was given a one-man show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, and one of her works was later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. New York art dealers gave one-man shows to Max Jimenez of Costa Rica, Federico Cantu of Mexico and Mario Carreño of Cuba. A gallery called Norte, devoted to the exhibition and sale of Latin American painting and sculpture, opened in New York but unfortunately was financially unable to continue.

Candido Portinari, Brazilian painter better known in the United States than any other South American artist, whose work toured American museums last year, completed four mural panels in the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress, Washington. Portinari received this commission through a project sponsored by the governments of Brazil and the United States. Jo Davidson, American sculptor, toured South America to make a series of 12 busts of South American presidents.

National Art Week.

The largest art fair ever held was initiated in 1940 by President Roosevelt and carried on its second annual program in November 1941. The national chairman appointed by the President was Thomas J. Watson, head of the International Business Machines Corporation; Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt was honorary chairman. A national council and state and local chairmen in every part of the country were appointed by Mr. Watson. One feature of this year's organization of Art Week was the setting up of business men's committees in every state to collaborate with art committees which consisted of museum directors, artists and other professional people. As in 1940 a major part of the organizational work of Art Week was carried on by the WPA Art Program.

Final sales returns for National Art Week in 1940 were announced in June 1941. Sales amounted to $100,018.45 for the sale of 13,717 items, average selling price being a little over $7.00 for each item. This would seem to indicate that a large new art-buying public in the low-priced brackets was being reached. Preliminary sales reports for 1941 indicated that approximately 17,000 items were sold for a total of $136,177. A considerable part of this increase was accounted for by the purchase made by the national chairman, Mr. Watson, who bought a watercolor and a sculpture in every state. However, there is no question that, apart from this, there was an advance in sales over 1940.

Museum Acquisitions.

The war has noticeably cut down the number of acquisitions which museums have been able to make in the past year. However, the following notable additions to museum collections were made: Rubens' Head of Cyrus Brought to Queen Tamyris, painted about 1622-23; John Singleton Copley's portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Winslow; and A La Mie, of 1891, by Toulouse-Lautrec, to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Christ and the Woman of Samaria by Veronese, and The Castaways by Magnasco, to the City Art Museum of St. Louis; a Velasquez portrait of the Infanta Margarita Maria, daughter of Philip IV, to the Fine Arts Society of San Diego; Sir Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of the Duchess of Hamilton and Argyll, to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco. The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco acquired a Spanish monastery consisting of a church, a cloister and a number of other buildings dating from the year 1185 through the 16th century. The monastery was purchased some years ago by William Randolph Hearst and brought to this country in 11 shiploads; it will be set up in Golden Gate Park. The Metropolitan Museum in New York received from the collection of the late Felix Warburg 228 prints including a splendid group of 44 Rembrandt etchings. Late in December the National Gallery of London announced the acquisition for £20,000 ($80,000) of a late masterpiece by Rembrandt, a woman's portrait of 1661, from the estate of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres.

The Museum of Modern Art acquired a great picture by Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night of 1889, first van Gogh to enter a New York museum. This museum also acquired Baron James Ensor's Temptations of St. Anthony of 1887, and canvases by Picasso, Matisse, Rouault, Bonnard, and a number of Americans. A pioneer collection of 20th century art formed by the Société Anonyme, which was founded in 1920 by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Katherine S. Dreier, was presented by Miss Dreier to Yale University. Consisting of some 450 paintings, sculptures and constructions representative of modern art in many phases from about 1910 to the present, the collection will be catalogued and in large part placed on permanent exhibition in the Yale University Art Gallery. A large number of United States museums purchased the work of contemporary American artists. (See also Sculpture.)

Art Sales.

In 1940 parts of the William Randolph Hearst collection were placed in St. Louis and Seattle department stores, making an unexpected number of sales. At the end of 1940 extensive lots of this collection were put on sale at Gimbel Brothers in New York. This was an innovation in art selling, which proved so successful that it may revolutionize art dealing. After sensational success with the Hearst collection Gimbel's became agent for the famous Clarence Mackay collection, six English collections sent over by the British Government, and the Warner S. McCall collection of St. Louis. The sale of 15,000 items took place in three months at Gimbel's; at a three-day sale of the Mackay collection $175,000 worth of items were disposed of.

America's largest art auction firm, the Parke-Bernet Galleries, reported an unusually active market in 1940-41, with the largest sales total since 1929. Top prices brought at the end of the year were $39,000 and $31,000 for two Romney portraits and $30,000 for a Hobbema landscape, all in the B. F. Jones sale.

1940: Painting And Sculpture

What becomes of art in a world at war is a question to which at least a partial answer has been given in Europe during 1940. The loss to the world of artistic talents destroyed in the actual fighting, the driving of artists into poverty-stricken exile, the destruction of art treasures through the bombing of cities, the necessary removal of the contents of great museums with consequent risk of damage and loss, the looting of art collections in defeated countries — these are some of the tragic events which 1940 brought in Europe.

In America many committees as well as private individuals were extremely active in attempting to aid Europe's war victims, and art played a prominent part in serving as a means to raise money for the benefit of these various causes. A large number of art exhibitions and art sales were organized for war relief, and hundreds of artists donated examples of their work to be auctioned or sold privately for the benefit of various relief organizations.

Refugee artists presented a distressing problem. A number of distinguished modern artists have been able to come to the United States without assistance, among them Fernand Léger, Salvador Dali and Piet Mondrian, but others are helplessly caught in Europe in a situation very unfriendly to modern art. The Emergency Rescue Committee in New York, and many other committees, in the United States, have endeavored to bring such artists into this country. All papers must be cleared through the President's Advisory Committee for Political and Intellectual Refugees. By the end of the year no artists had been brought to the United States through this Committee, chiefly because of delays on the part of our immigration authorities and difficulties of obtaining exit visas in Europe.

Great Britain made a valiant attempt to salvage the talents of her distinguished artists by employing them in an official capacity to record the war both at home and abroad, under the direction of a committee consisting of Sir Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, Sir Walter Russell, Sir Muirhead Bone, and Mr. P. H. Jowett. Paintings and drawings made by the large number of British artists so employed were placed on exhibition in the National Gallery in London, and later a group of the pictures was sent to the United States for exhibition during 1941.

The only notable exhibition of the year in Europe (where formerly so many important exhibitions were annually assembled) was held in Lisbon and consisted of a group of 15th and 16th century Portuguese paintings. Brought together for the first time, these Portuguese primitives surprisingly revealed the existence of a school of painting almost the equal of the Flemish school by which it was strongly influenced.

There are a great many refugee works of art in America, some of which were brought over before the war for exhibition in museums or at the World's Fairs, and some of which are included in important private collections which have been brought here by their owners.

Art at the Fairs.

The Masterpieces of Art exhibition at the New York World's Fair, for the second year sponsored by Art Associates, Inc., was directed by Walter Pach and catalogued 383 notable items. The Contemporary Art Building was allocated to the WPA Art Program and to a changing series of exhibitions contributed by many art societies and institutions, such as the Sculptors' Guild, the American Watercolor Society, the Museum of Modern Art, etc. At San Francisco's Golden Gate International Exposition Walter Heil directed the old master section; Herman More assisted in the selection of the contemporary American show; Dr. Grace McCann Morley selected the Central and South American section.

An interesting feature of both Fairs in both 1939 and 1940 was the artistic role played by the International Business Machines Corporation. In 1939 this corporation bought two groups of 79 paintings each from artists in various European countries and in America, each group being shown in the I.B.M. building at the two Fairs. In 1940 the I.B.M. exhibitions contained 106 paintings by living American artists, purchased by art authorities in each state who had been instructed to buy canvases representative of the art and character of the particular state without restriction as to subject or price. At the close of the Fairs these paintings were shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D. C., and then started on a coast-to-coast tour of American museums.

Museum Exhibitions.

One of the most remarkable exhibitions of the year was the Art of the Middle Ages held at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The two great repositories of medieval art in America, the Morgan Library in New York and the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, provided the backbone of the exhibition, with the addition of loans from 50 other institutions and private collections. Some 320 precious objects were shown, including paintings, stone carvings, manuscripts, tapestries and silks, ivory carvings, mosaics, altar accessories and vestments, jewels and coins. A second outstanding event of the year was the great exhibition of Persian art held in New York, the most important ever assembled in the Western Hemisphere and rivaling the London show of nine years ago. The exhibition, which covered a period of 6,000 years, was sponsored by the American Institute for Iranian Art and was directed by Arthur Upham Pope. Another very large and ambitious exhibition was the Survey of American Painting at Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, covering 260 years of our native art from the series of children's portraits painted in 1670 by an unknown master to the contemporary American world.

Several notable old master exhibitions, besides those at the New York and San Francisco Fairs, were held in the United States. Twenty-eight Italian paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance and Baroque periods lent by the Royal Italian Government, which had previously been seen at the Golden Gate Exposition and in Chicago, were exhibited with record-breaking attendance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition, which included Raphael's Madonna of the Chair, Botticelli's Birth of Venus, and a superb group of sculptures by Michelangelo, Donatello, Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo, and others, was accepted by a museum chiefly concerned with 20th century art when it became apparent that otherwise the masterpieces could not be seen in New York at all before their return to Italy (where a law had already been passed forbidding their ever being sent out of the country again). The Newark (N. J.) Museum held a showing of refugee masterpieces, all European owned, which had originally come to the United States for the two 1939 Fairs. A very large exhibition of old and modern masters was assembled and shown at two San Francisco museums, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor and the M. H. De Young Memorial Museum. Toledo's Museum of Art arranged a fine show of Venetian Art. About 40 Italian and English landscape paintings of the 18th century were shown at the Yale Gallery of Fine Arts. Also of special interest were the following: Night Scenes in 500 years of painting, at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum; and North European Painting of Germany, Holland and Flanders at the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City.

The 19th century in both American and European art was ably demonstrated in several interesting exhibitions: at Detroit's Institute of Arts in The Age of Impressionism and Objective Realism; at the Baltimore Art Museum in American Romanticism (between 1812 and 1865); and an Impressionist exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum. New York saw two one-man shows of 19th century Americans: at the Brooklyn Museum 100 paintings and drawings by Eastman Johnson (1824-1906), realistic genre and portrait painter whose work seems to have been considerably underestimated in recent years; and at the New York Historical Society, paintings, chiefly portraits, by John Wesley Jarvis (1780-1834).

The major one-man exhibition held in a museum this year was the great Picasso exhibition, which was assembled by the Museum of Modern Art and shown there at the end of 1939, and which then went to the Art Institute of Chicago, joint-sponsor of the exhibition. A large part of the Picasso show was on view thereafter at museums in Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and San Francisco.

Another one-man exhibition of importance was the retrospective group of paintings by Georges Rouault, veteran French modernist, assembled by the Boston Institute of Modern Art, and later shown at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D. C. The war cancelled many loans to this show from Europe, but the large number of Rouault paintings owned in this country made possible a distinguished exhibition of about 90 works. Another one-man show was a large group of paintings by Georges Braque, collaborator with Picasso in the early development of Cubism; this was shown at the Phillips Memorial Gallery, at the Arts Club of Chicago and in San Francisco.

The majority of other one-man shows in museums were American and contemporary: Fletcher Martin, rising young Pacific Coast painter, had a show at the Los Angeles Museum; Thomas Benton, at the Dallas Museum; Mahonri Young, sculptor and painter, it the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass.; Clarence Carter, at Carnegie Institute; Francis Speight, at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D. C; and Earl Horter (memorial show), at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Columbus, Ohio, arranged at the Gallery of Fine Arts a retrospective exhibition of paintings by its famous native son, the late George Bellows.

Contemporary American art was featured in an ever-increasing number of annual and biennial exhibitions in museums all over the United States. Among these may be mentioned as outstanding those at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Chicago Art Institute; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and a first Texas annual held at museums in Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. The Museum of Modern Art in New York showed about 100 distinguished paintings by the younger Americans, chiefly selected from work done under the WPA Art Program. These paintings were presented in the form of three traveling exhibitions, entitled The Face of America, 35 Painters Under 35, and Mystery and Sentiment, first shown in the Museum, then at the New York World's Fair, and then starting a tour of the country. The Whitney Museum held two mural painting exhibitions: a showing of designs for murals and sculpture to decorate Federal buildings, commissioned by the Section of Fine Arts; and an invited membership show of the National Society of Mural Painters.

Exhibitions in Dealers' Galleries.

Of greatest interest and significance among the exhibitions arranged by art dealers in 1940 were a number of one-man shows held in New York. The first exhibition in America of works by the great 17th century French painter, Poussin, consisted of eleven oil paintings, nine of them never before shown in New York. Thirty years ago not a single painting by Poussin was owned in America; today the great interest in him on the part of both artists and collectors is reflected in the number of important works now owned in this country. Paintings by Alessandro Magnasco, 18th century Milanese painter of the Baroque tradition, were also assembled for the first time here. This exhibition of 19 paintings included several examples recently acquired by eastern museums. The first comprehensive exhibition of paintings by Jacob Jordaens, 17th century contemporary of Rubens and Van Dyck, was also held in New York. The New York public saw paintings and drawings by the great French classicists of the 19th century, Jacques Louis David and I. A. D. Ingres; and 25 paintings by Gustave Courbet, the later 19th century French realist. Other noteworthy showings included 25 Italian Renaissance portraits; and 35 self portraits by the old masters, covering three centuries, from the Baroque period to Impressionism, in eight countries. In the contemporary field there were many group exhibitions, among which may be mentioned Landmarks of Modern German Art, and American Abstract Art, representing 23 artists.

The following living Americans, some of whom were already known for their appearance in recent group exhibitions and others of whom were making an initial appearance in New York, had their first one-man shows in dealers' galleries this year: Darrel Austin, Rainey Bennett, Charles Campbell, Jo Cantine, Lucille Corcos, Lewis Daniel, Gladys Rockmore Davis, Karl Fortess, Emil J. Kosa, Jr., Paul Lantz, Fletcher Martin, Roderick Mead, Bruce Mitchell, Helen Sawyer, Mitchell Siporin, and Richard Sussman.

The following living Americans, well known to all who follow contemporary trends in this country, had one-man exhibitions in New York: Annot, Revington Arthur, Milton Avery, A. S. Baylinson, Arnold Blanch, Louis Bouché, Robert Brackman, Ann Brockman, David Burliuk, John Carroll, James Chapin, Jean Charlot, Nicolai Cikovsky, Jon Corbino, Bernadine Custer, Julio De Diego, Adolf Dehn, Walt Dehner, Joseph De Martini, Edwin Dickinson, Frank Di Gioia, Nathaniel Dirk, Lamar Dodd, Paul Dougherty, Arthur G. Dove, Stephen Etnier, Emlen Etting, Philip Evergood, Ernest Fiene, Arnold Friedman, Adolf Gottlieb, Harry Gottlieb, Donald Greason, William Gropper, Maurice Grosser, Marsden Hartley, John Edward Heliker, Victor Higgins, Alexander James, Mervin Jules, Morris Kantor, Walt Kuhn, Lawrence Lebduska, Julian Levi, Loren Maclver, Jennie and Ethel Magafan, John Marin, Reginald Marsh, William Meyerowitz, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Robert Philipp, Joseph Pollet, Henry Varnum Poor, Edna Reindel, Boardman Robinson, Andrée Ruellan, Henry Schnakenberg, Manfred Schwartz, Zoltan Sepeshy, Ben Shahn, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Solman, Moses Soyer, Chuzu Tamotzu, Frederic Taubes, Byron Thomas, Tromka, Nahum Tschacbasov, Frede Vidar, Carol Weinstock, Harold Weston, John Whorf, and Sol Wilson. 'Primitive' or naive artists continued to receive attention. The following had one-man exhibitions of their work in New York, all of them making first appearances: Anna M. R. Moses, Horace Pippin, Patsy Santo, and William Aiken Walker.

Among 20th century European painters who had solo exhibitions in New York galleries were Max Beckmann, Arbit Blatas, Marc Chagall, Giorgio de Chirico, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Jean Hélion, Ferdinand Hodler, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, Ernst Leyden, Franz Marc, Joan Miro, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Rouault, Chaim Soutine, Maurice Utrillo, and Maurice Vlaminck. Possibly the most important of these was the memorial exhibition of 100 pictures by Paul Klee, who died in the summer of 1940. The oriental painter, Yun Gee, had a one-man exhibition.

Sculpture.

The field of sculpture continued during 1940 to attract the very real talents of a considerable group of young American artists. Although the splendid opportunities for sculpture on a monumental scale provided in the past year by the San Francisco and New York Fairs were lacking in 1940, the very sound revival of interest and activity in the art of sculpture continued to boom. Evidence of this was to be found in the ever-increasing number of notable one-man and group exhibitions of sculpture held. Young Americans of great promise, and in some cases of real achievement, who had one-man shows in or near New York were: Mary Ogden Abbott, Leo Amino, David Burliuk, Jr., Doris Caesar, Alexander Calder, Cornelia Van A. Chapin, Robert Cronbach, Louis Dlugosz, Eugenie Gershoy, Marianne Gold, Milton Hebald, John Hovannes, Silvia Shaw Judson, Frederic Littman, John Rood, David Smith, Challis Walker, Anita Weschler, and Agnes Yarnall. Among the older men who held exhibitions were José de Creeft, Jo Davidson, Carl Milles, Wheeler Williams, and Mahonri Young. At dealers' galleries in New York several interesting group shows of American sculpture included many of the sculptors named above, and, in addition, Harold Ambellan, Alexander Archipenko, Rhys Caparn, Jean De Marco, Herzl Emanuel, Franc Epping, Clara Fasano, Herbert Ferber, John B. Flannagan, Helen Gaulois, Minna Harkavy, Wiliard Hirsch, Paul Huyn, Nathaniel Kaz, Henry Kreis, Simon Moselsio, Hugo Robus, Heinz Warneke, Arline Wingate, Warren Wheelock, Beverly Woodner, and two English sculptors living in the United States, Dorothy Simmons and Oliver O'Connor Barrett.

The Sculptors' Guild, well known American society founded in 1937 to further the interests of sculpture, held its annual membership exhibition this year in the Contemporary Arts Building at the New York World's Fair. The Guild also organized its first traveling exhibition, consisting of 56 pieces of sculpture, which had its first showing at the Labor Building in Washington, D. C.

The most ambitions museum exhibition of sculpture during the year was that staged by the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a means of surveying the contemporary field to select six sculptors for six $10,000 commissions for Fairmount Park monuments. This exhibition was international in scope and contained 412 works by 215 Americans and 30 foreign sculptors. The commissions, to be executed for the Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial in this city park, will constitute the second of a series begun in 1933 when Philadelphia held another huge sculpture international. At that time commissions were awarded to Maurice Sterne, Robert Laurent, J. Wallace Kelly, John B. Flannagan, Helene Sardeau and Heinz Warneke. The winners of this year's commissions have not yet been announced. (For other sculpture commissions, see section United States Government Art Program.)

The Museum of Modern Art had on view during much of the year, both in its specially designed sculpture galleries and its out-of-door sculpture garden, the outstanding collection of modern European sculpture in America. This collection was augmented by an important gift of 36 modern sculptures, which included works by Maillol, Despiau, Lehmbruck, Kolbe, Lachaise, and others, who were allotted a special exhibition. The Art Institute of Chicago exhibited 92 pieces of sculpture by 60 Chicago artists. The Whitney Museum in New York invited a membership exhibition of the National Sculpture Society, the first showing of this mainly conservative group since 1929 in San Francisco. The Baltimore Museum of Art arranged the largest exhibition ever held in this country of the work of the Swedish-American sculptor, Carl Milles. At the Columbus (Ohio) Gallery of Fine Art, Erwin Frey of Ohio was accorded a one-man showing of his sculpture. In New York the 10 ton stainless steel sculpture in high relief, commissioned from the Japanese-American Isamu Noguchi, was installed over the entrance to the Associated Press Building in Rockefeller Center. A seven-foot pink alabaster figure of Adam, the latest controversial work of Jacob Epstein, American-born sculptor who has lived most of his life in England, was exhibited for commercial purposes in New York without the authorization of the sculptor.

A few sculpture exhibitions outside the contemporary field may be mentioned. The Metropolitan Museum in New York arranged Heads in Sculpture, an enlightening comparison of a single problem in sculpture as treated in a great number of different periods. The Metropolitan also showed sculptures and watercolors by the famous 19th century French sculptor of animals, Antoine Barye. A famous collection of French 18th century sculpture, including Houdon, Clodion, Pigalle, Coysevox, and others, was shown at a New York gallery. Another gallery showed a unique set of 20 extraordinary life masks of American patriots, presidents, and statesmen, made by John H. I. Browere (1792-1834). This show was sponsored by the New York State Historical Society of Cooperstown, which later received the whole group of heads as a gift to its collection.

Acquisitions in sculpture by American museums were not particularly numerous but were of excellent quality. Two Italian Renaissance works of outstanding importance entered the Detroit Institute of Arts, a terra cotta Virgin and Child by Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) and a St. John by Jacopo della Quercia (c.1371-1438). Two rare Renaissance bronzes from the Clendenin Ryan collection entered museums, St. Sebastian by Alessandro Vittoria (1525-1608) going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and an allegorical figure representing Architecture by Gian Bologna (1524-1608) to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The Metropolitan Museum also acquired two important French Gothic pieces of the 13th century — statues of King Clovis and King Clothar. In the modern field, examples by Lehmbruck and Barlach were acquired by the Chicago Art Institute, and a Lehmbruck by the Portland (Ore.) Museum. The acquisition of 36 fine modern sculptures by the Museum of Modern Art has been mentioned. In addition the Museum of Modern Act acquired sculpture by Barlach, Lipchitz and Henry Moore, and by the Americans José de Creeft, Hugo Robus and Louis Dlugosz.

United States Government Art Program.

Both the WPA Art Program and the Section of Fine Arts of the Public Buildings Administration (formerly the Section of Painting and Sculpture of the Treasury Department) continued to function during 1940, employing several thousand artists and playing a more important part than any other agency in the country, and probably in the world, to bring art to an increasingly large public.

The WPA Art Program.

The WPA Art Program, which since its inception in 1935 has employed between 3,000 and 5,500 needy painters and sculptors, art teachers, technical and research workers, model, map and poster makers, etc, for the benefit of the public, had, during 1940, 41 statewide art projects in 41 states, as well as the District of Columbia, New York City and Southern California. States which have not had art projects are Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota and South Carolina, the reason for this being that in those states personnel certified for relief in the art field has heretofore not been found in numbers sufficient to justify the setting up of art projects. The national office of the WPA Art Program has been continued under the direction of Holger Cahill, with an exhibition center which selected and sent on tour several hundred traveling shows to community art centers and other organizations throughout the country.

For several years one of the most constructive phases of the Art Program has been the establishment and maintenance, with community guidance and support, of the community art centers in parts of the country not already served by museums or other art organizations. This part of the program was extended still further in 1940, the number of these community art centers having been increased from 72 to 84, in Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia. The amount contributed to these art centers by the communities involved rose in 1940 from $500,000 to $850,000. Attendance at the centers has averaged some 350,000 a month, and another 400,000 persons have seen art and handicraft exhibitions arranged by the WPA Art Program aside from those held in the art centers.

Production figures for the WPA Art Program show that since its inception in 1935 it has produced and allocated to public tax-supported institutions, such as schools, libraries, hospitals and court houses, approximately 1,550 murals, 52,000 oil and watercolor paintings, 95,000 fine prints from 4,000 original designs, and 4,200 sculptures. These figures are significant when it is recalled that among the artists who produced the work were the winners of most of the prominent mural and sculpture competitions of the past year, including the first three places in the competition for murals for the Social Security Building and for the St. Louis Post Office Building. These WPA artists have repeatedly won commissions in competition with the leading artists of America. One of the major mural jobs completed under the WPA in 1940 was the decoration by Edward Laning of large wall spaces in the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, an important commission which has been awaiting the selection of an artist for many years.

The WPA's outstanding exhibition of the year was held at the New York World's Fair. Mayor LaGuardia and the World's Fair Corporation contributed the Contemporary Arts Building for the purpose, making it possible for new and larger audiences to study the scope of the Government's art patronage. Actually the public had a share in selecting the work shown in this exhibition, in that a large proportion of it was borrowed back from schools, libraries, colleges, and museums which had selected it from the production of the Art Program.

The Index of American Design.

The Index of American Design, the huge compendium of carefully drawn and documented color plates illustrating the history of the decorative arts in America, has continued to be one of the most valuable phases of the work of the WPA Art Program. The Index plates have been extensively exhibited all over the country during the year, attracting wide interest and enthusiasm. To make this valuable body of material usable for the American public, publication of the Index in a series of color portfolios is desirable, but efforts to interest publishers in risking large sums of money in such publication have so far not succeeded. To meet this need the art projects themselves have begun work on a series of portfolios reproducing by the silk screen process some of the basic elements of design from the Index for use in schools, museums, libraries, etc.

An important experiment known as National Art Week was carried on in 1940, initiated and in great part organized by the WPA Art Program. National Art Week was proclaimed by President Roosevelt and took place at the end of November. Its purpose was to stimulate the sale of American art through sales exhibitions to be held in great numbers in communities throughout the whole country. In his letter inviting Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to act as national chairman, the President stated: '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.' Some 6,000 prominent citizens accepted membership on national, state and local councils in the 48 states, the District of Columbia, and Hawaii, to carry out the program of National Art Week. Artists and craftsmen entered approximately 130,000 works in the 1,641 sales exhibitions held. Although the results in actual sales were not as impressive as had been hoped, art authorities agreed that the experiment had been decidedly worth while and that National Art Week should be made an annual event, with the necessary time for preparation which had been seriously lacking in 1940.

The Section of Fine Arts of the Public Buildings Administration, Federal Works Agency, continued to use 1 per cent of the cost of Federal buildings for mural paintings and sculpture to decorate these buildings. A number of competitions were held, as in years past, and commissions carried out by the winners. Among the largest commissions given were $19,980 to the painter Ben Shahn for a mural for the new Social Security Building, $16,000 to the sculptor Robert Cronbach to decorate the same building, and $9,000 to the sculptor Henry Kreis for three sculptures for the new War Department Building. Thirty-two living rooms in the 16 buildings of the Marine Hospital in Louisiana, housing 400 lepers, were decorated, at a cost of $9,000, with 300 watercolors which were selected by a jury under the direction of the Section of Fine Arts from submissions sent in by artists all over the country. The year's major exhibition of work done under the Section of Fine Arts was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and consisted of winning competition models and studies for murals and sculpture.

Art in National Defense.

One of the important new orientations during the past year has been that of the use of the artist in the national defense program. The WPA Art Program has a passive defense project certified by the War Department to carry on highly technical research in camouflage. Art projects as well as private organizations in all parts of the country are working toward this end; for instance, the Kansas City Art Institute has set up classes in camouflage for artists. The WPA Program in every state is making plans for extensive services both for military and civilian defense. These activities will take such forms as camouflage, map-making for instruction and for range finding, drawings for instruction of various kinds such as for the illustration of the Manual of Arms and for lecture purposes, photography, cultural recreational activities for the army in art centers, decoration of cantonments, especially hostess houses, and cultural recreation for civilian morale.

Cultural Relations with Latin America.

President Roosevelt's appointment of Nelson A. Rockefeller to the Council of National Defense as Coordinator of Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics, focused attention on one phase of the U. S. State Department's broad program for promoting closer inter-American relations. It is probable that art and other cultural interests in the United States will be extensively used in this program. Plans are now being made for organizing a number of exhibitions illustrating American art and life to be sent on tour through Central and South America.

Already during 1939 and 1940 the large number of art exhibitions brought from the other Americas to the United States has indicated a strong tendency in the direction of an exchange of cultural ideas. Most impressive of the Latin American art exhibitions of the year was the Central and South American section at the Golden Gate International Exhibition in 1940, assembled by Dr. Grace McCann Morley, who spent several weeks selecting 80 contemporary paintings in Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador and Costa Rica. Another large undertaking was the Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, a huge exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York under the sponsorship of the Mexican government. At the San Francisco Exposition Diego Rivera, famous Mexican mural painter, painted an enormous fresco as a public demonstration; while José Clemente Orozco, equally famous Mexican mural painter, demonstrated his technique in fresco painting as part of the Mexican exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The Riverside Museum in New York, which has recently had several exhibitions of Latin American art, showed this year 209 works from Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico and Venezuela. The Los Angeles Museum showed Pre-Columbian Art of the Americas. Argentine art was shown in an exhibition of 236 paintings, sculptures and prints by 76 living artists at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art in Richmond, and later toured the country under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts.

Four prominent United States museums gave one-man exhibitions to Latin American artists. The Detroit Institute of Arts and the Museum of Modern Art brought before the American public the paintings of Brazil's outstanding artist, Candido Portinari; and both museums bought examples of his work. This painter had already become known in the United States through his handsome mural decorations in Brazil's pavilion at the New York World's Fair. The San Francisco Museum of Art showed the paintings of Roberto Berdecio of Bolivia, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C. showed work by the Cuban painter, Esteban Valderrama.

In addition to these artists who were given museum showings, the following artists had one-man shows in New York dealers' galleries: Federico Cantu (Mexican), Ricardo Gomez Campuzano (Colombia), Max Jiminez (Costa Rica), Lasar Segall (Brazil), Daniel Serra (Cuba), David Alfaro Siqueiros (Mexicoan), and Rufino Tamayo (Mexican Indian).

Museum Acquisitions.

When the new National Gallery in Washington, D. C., opens in March, 1941, it will contain the cream of three great American art collections, the Mellon, the Kress, and the Widener. Most important news of the year in the museum field was the announcement of the gift of the Widener collection to the National Gallery. Famous for three generations, this collection contains over 100 important paintings, as well as Renaissance sculpture, the celebrated Mazarin tapestry, porcelains, jewels and other objects of art. Announcement of the gift was made by Peter A. B. Widener II, grandson of the founder of the collection, Peter A. B. Widener, whose son Joseph weeded the collection from some 400 items to its present highly selective content. In the collection are 13 Rembrandts, including The Mill; The Small Cowper Madonna of Raphael; Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Mantegna; Vermeer's Woman Weighing Pearls; The Feast of the Gods by Giovanni Bellini; Donatello's marble David; and splendid works by Rubens, Van Dyck, El Greco, Titian, Veronese, and many others.

Assurance that the National Gallery will also contain a section devoted to American art was given when the Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust announced the gift to the institution of 11 famous paintings by early American artists, namely Gilbert Stuart (five examples), John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, John Trumbull, Edward Savage, Mather Brown and Chester Harding.

In the old-master field other notable museum acquisitions during the year were: Tintoretto's Finding of Moses, a superb mid-16th century painting from the collection of the 19th century English academician, Richard Westall, by the Metropolitan Museum in New York; by the City Art Museum of St. Louis a Madonna and Child with the Saints Peter, John, Dominic and Nicholas, painted about 1490-1500 by Piero di Cosimo; and by the same museum a Crucifixion by Tiepolo; this museum also received a bequest of the Horace M. Swope collection of 712 fine prints. An important early Italian painting of the Madonna and Child by Lorenzo Monaca entered the collection of the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City; the Penitent St. Peter by El Greco was acquired by the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery, and also the Portrait of Paola Morosini by Giovanni Bellini, and Van Dyck's Queen Henrietta Maria; the Detroit Institute of Arts added to one of the finest collections of Dutch paintings in America the Jan Steen Fair at Oegstgeest, which had been shown at the New York World's Fair. The recent wealth of examples by the great 17th century master, Poussin, in American collections was augmented by the acquisitions of two museums: the Venus and Adonis, by the Smith College Museum of Art, and Mars and Venus by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Boston also acquired a lost Rubens portrait of a 16th century Berber prince, Mulay Ahmad, a Portrait of a Lady by Piero della Francesca, and a 1794 portrait of Huldah Bradley by the American, Ralph Earl. The Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D. C., acquired a Hogarth, The Singing Party; and the Worcester Art Museum the bequest of the Mary G. Ellis collection of European and American paintings. The Art Institute of Chicago acquired a portrait by the 19th century American, Thomas Eakins. To colonial Williamsburg Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave her pioneer collection of 250 early American folk paintings and sculptures, assembled over a period of nine years, which has since 1935 been on exhibition at Williamsburg in the Ludwell-Paradise House.

In the field of modern art the Phillips Memorial Gallery purchased a great Matisse of 1916, The Studio. Another great modern canvas, The Old King by Georges Rouault, entered the collection of the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh. The Frick Collection in New York, continuing its policy initiated last year with the purchase of a Cézanne, added two more works of modern art to its collection of old masters, an early Cézanne, Uncle Dominic as a Monk, and a Tahitian Landscape by Paul Gauguin. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired a famous canvas of 1897, The Sleeping Gypsy, by Henri Rousseau; notable paintings by James Ensor, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, and other Europeans; and a large collection of modern prints, drawings and watercolors.

The New York World's Fair in 1940 announced the purchase of works by 31 living Americans from the exhibition of 1939, American Art Today, and the donation of the works to museums throughout the country. The artists were: Ethel Magafan of Colorado; Walt Killam of Connecticut; Norman MacLeish of Illinois; Jack Levine of Massachusetts; Sydney Fossum of Minnesota; Joseph Meert of Missouri; Patrocino Barela of New Mexico; Harry Dix, Anton Refregier, Robert Ryman and Meyer Wolfe of New York; Marie Delleney, William Lester and Florence McClung of Texas; Edmund Lewandowski of Wisconsin; and a number of printmakers.

Henry Varnum Poor, well known American mural painter, received a $4,500 commission to paint a mural in fresco at Penn State College, in the town of State College, Pa., as a gift of the class of 1932. This was an interesting and significant variation of the usual type of class gift such as sundials, bird baths, trees, or memorial plaques, especially since the artist was asked to paint the fresco while the college was in session so that the students might observe the actual work in progress. A similarly enlightened aesthetic attitude led the graduating class at Southern Methodist University in Texas to start a collection of regional art with a gift of four canvases by Everett Spruce, William Lester, Jerry Bywaters and Otis Dozier, all of Texas. (See also museum acquisitions under the section Sculpture.)

Art and Business.

One of the healthiest developments to be noted recently in the American art world is the use of the work of the artist (not the commercial artist) by industry and business. In the spring of 1940 New York's new daily newspaper, PM, proposed to use illustrations drawn or painted by artists to an extent equal to its use of photography, that is, to stimulate a return to the use of art to illustrate the news which has been so largely replaced by photo-engraving. In a search for artists who could report the news with brush or pen, PM ran a competition, sponsored and conducted by the Museum of Modern Art. Nearly 2,000 entries were received and the 22 prize-winning drawings and a large group of others selected by a jury were exhibited in the Museum. Subsequently, PM has made considerable use of artists, although possibly not to such an extent as had been hoped.

Steuben Glass, Inc., commissioned a distinguished group of 27 of the best-known painters and sculptors of America, France and England to make pictures to be engraved on fine glass vases, bowls, etc. The finished pieces were exhibited in the Steuben New York showrooms.

The advertising agency, N. W. Ayer & Son of Philadelphia, has been responsible for the employment of leading artists for advertising purposes by a number of business organizations. De Beers, the diamond firm, has employed well-known artists for a series of drawings used in its advertising. The Dole Pineapple Company has sent several distinguished artists to Hawaii to paint studies of the local landscape and flora, to be used in advertising. Georgia O'Keeffe received this commission in 1940.

Several notable commissions were given to artists by private individuals. Rainey Bennett, young Chicago watercolorist, was sent to Venezuela to record aspects of the country and its industry. Nine painters were commissioned by a motion picture director to record scenes of the making of the film version of Eugene O'Neill's The Long Voyage Home; this $50,000 commission was one of the largest given to American art. A New York night-club owner employed a well known painter, Anton Refregier, to take complete charge of the decoration of his club, as well as to paint murals in it, the result being an extremely handsome modern interior.

Sales.

To judge from the annual end-of-season report of a large auction gallery in New York, the buying public has displayed no reluctance to purchase art. Even the catastrophe of the war in Europe has failed to shake to any great extent the stability of the art market. Well known art collections dispersed at auction in New York City were the Clendenin J. Ryan collection, realizing $369,447, and the Samuel Untermyer estate, realizing $186,341. High prices paid in the Ryan sale were $14,000 for a 10 by 13-inch 15th century Burgundian portrait; $16,000 for a portrait by Andrea Solario; $10,000 for Tiepolo's Crucifixion; and $40,500 for a set of 20 famous etched portraits by Van Dyck. In the Untermyer sale $18,000 was paid for Rubens' Feast of the River Gods; $11,750 for Benvenuto Celiini's bronze Jupiter; and $7,000 for Whistler's celebrated Nocturne in Black and Gold; Falling Rocket, once called by John Ruskin 'a pot of paint flung in the public's face.' The William Randolph Hearst collection continued to be dispersed gradually by the International Studio Art Corporation; sections of it were offered for sale in department stores in Seattle, St. Louis, and New York.