At the Galleries
The biggest, most prestigious art galleries were located on West 57th Street in 1946. Others were located close by. The Village gallery scene was in decline from its heyday now that uptown galleries were more open to the modernists.
The gallery show getting the most attention this week was the 100 year anniversary show at Knoedler, which Robert Coates of The New Yorker called "now certainly the most august place in town, with the possible exception of St. John the Divine," a far cry from its start downtown as a print and artist supply shop. Here is a history of the gallery written on this occasion by Charles Henschel, the firm's president and grandson of its founder.
The show consisted of art works that had been handled by the gallery during the century of its existence. Much of them were on loan from the Metropolitan and the New York Historical Society. While a smattering of Old Masters as well as French Impressionists were represented, it was the first room where the art that had been popular in the 19th century was hung in the manner of the period in multiple tiers that drew the most attention. The critics saw much in common between this show and the concurrent exhibition at the Metropolitan on the "taste of the Seventies." Coates said the selection was uncritical with a lot of dross among the jewels. The focus was on the collectors of the periods represented rather than the artists. Edgar Alden Jewell of The Times found the “scene is at once gay, conglomerate and appalling…we stand aghast before the outspread evidence of the taste of our forebears." The show was a big hit, drawing a large crowd, many to see the "real art" of their youth or their parents' day.
Brendan Gill visited and wrote about his experience that week in "The Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker. Gill noted that the first room held such old-fashioned “horrors” as “Napoleon Reconnoitering” and Rosa Bonheur’s “Weaning the Calves.” Bonheur’s reputation and Victorian art in general have been much rehabilitated since Gill wrote. He met with the exhibit’s curator who gave him the same facts that had appeared a few weeks earlier in a New York Times feature on the exhibit. Mostly she talked about the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age who apparently sometimes bought their artwork in bulk. More recently, she recounted, Charles Henschel, head of the gallery in 1946 and the grandson of its founder, had negotiated the sale by the Soviet government in 1929-30 of 30 masterworks from the Hermitage for $12-million. The subsequent sale of one of the artworks, the “Alba Madonna” by Raphael, to Andrew Mellon for $1,080,000 was the standing record for an art sale in 1946. The Hermitage paintings later would become the core of Mellon’s grant to the National Gallery. Gill was escorted to a wood-paneled back office on the second floor where he was introduced to Henschel, described as a handsome, middle-aged man. Henschel’s black spaniel lounged on a sofa and there was a cannel coal fire burning in the marble fireplace. A secretary brewed tea behind a green satin curtain.
Other Shows of note:
The Wildenstein Gallery on East 64th Street had a benefit show of works by Gauguin to raise money for the New York Infirmary. The gallery specialized in French art.
On a more contemporary note, Jackson Pollack, the "wild man" of abstract expressionism had a show at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery Art of This Century on West 57th. Pollack and his new wife, the artist Lee Krasner, had recently purchased their home in Springs on the east end of Long Island and were living largely off an annual stipend provided by Guggenheim. He was still in an experimental stage in 1946 and would not start the drip paintings that brought him fame until the following year. Guggenheim opened her gallery in 1942 to showcase the work of European artists, particularly surrealists, and a group of still largely unknown American artists many of whom became known as the abstract expressionists, a term coined by Coates. In 1946, she divorced the artist Max Ernst and published the first volume of her scandalous memoirs Out of this Century. Her gallery closed in 1947.
Kleeman was showing engravings by Peter Breughel.
Durand-Rand had a show of 19th Century French art.
The Charles Egan Gallery, a newcomer to East 57th Street that specialized in contemporary artists, had intimate works by Joseph Stella, who died in November 1946.
Alfred Stieglitz's An American Place had drawings by John Marin, one of the most notable artists in the Stieglitz stable. The gallery was located on the seventeenth floor of 509 Madison Avenue. Stieglitz, who had been among the earliest promoters of modern art and photography, died of a stroke in July.
Another young abstract expressionist, Theodore Stamos was exhibiting with surrealist Giglio Dante at Mortimer Brandt on East 57th.