Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell looked back at the week's major art openings in his Sunday feature. He wrote that the Whitney retrospective "Pioneers of Modern Art" was a worthwhile show from a documentary perspective but offered less in terms of aesthetic reward. The show covered American artists from 1908-1922. It wasn't that the work on display was bad but contemporary art had progressed much since the Armory Show of 1913 introduced thousands of Americans to the movements that had been brewing in Paris since the beginning of the century. Much of the work produced in that decade no longer seemed radical or shocking in 1946 (although see a retrograde opinion expressed that same day in The Times Sunday Magazine for proof that not everyone had abandoned Victorian tastes). Jewell noted that some American artists who had worked or studied in Paris before the First World War had participated in modernism from its beginnings, but he found much of these early efforts academic and derivative. Among those that he felt developed a distinctive style early on were Charles Burchfield, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Preston Dickinson, Arthur G. Dove, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, Maurice Sterne, Georgia O'Keefe and Marsden Hartley. Jewell wrote that creative modernism was more evident in painting than in sculpture but appeared in early works by Gaston Lachaise and Robert Laurent. In 1946 most of these artists were now around sixty.
Jewell was very laudatory about the Chagall exhibit put together by James Johnson Sweeney at the Museum of Modern Art. Chagall, he believed, was strikingly independent in his development from the start. Robert Coates had a somewhat different take on Chagall that week in The New Yorker.
Jewell thanked Alfred Stieglitz for the exhibition at his American Place of drawings by John Marin which Jewell found "constantly exhilarating." He noted the third anniversary exhibit at Niveau Gallery called "Masters of Tomorrow?" David Aronson, Joseph Buzzelli, Cobelle, Kahlil Gibran, John Nichols, Raisa Robbins, Corrado Marcarelli and Charles Schucker were the participating artists, some of whom were part of the budding abstract expressionist school.
The National Association of Women Artists had its 54th annual show at the National Gallery. Nearly 200 items were on exhibit. Most were academic in the conservative sense. Jewell found them often sound but sometimes "with a good deal to be desired on every count."
He wrote that he would revisit the splendid George Inness retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum when he had more space available. He had reviewed the show on April 6.