Art in The New Yorker
Robert M. Coates reviewed the Marc Chagall show at the Museum of Modern Art in the April 20 issue. He felt that Chagall was one of those successful artists who had become victims of their success, put into a small box by art dealers and the public, in his case as "the painter of gently amorous fantasies....floating picturesquely against a Russian village background." Coates wrote that the show at the Modern showed the artist in a more varied light by including many of his earlier works when he was experimenting with expressionism and cubism. Coates added that in the 1930s the artist succumbed to commercial pressure to churn out the sort of works for which he had become famous with “dreary” results; only one painting from that decade was included in the exhibition. The more recent work, however, Coates said demonstrated a new authority over his genre and subject matter which compensated for his loss of variety.
That week the Metropolitan had an exhibit of Egyptian Antiquities as well as a show of “The Taste of the Seventies,” a premature celebration of the museum’s 75th anniversary. The Brooklyn Museum had a George Inness exhibition and the Whitney Museum, which was located on Eighth Street at this time, featured a review of American art from 1908 to 1922.
Gallery hoppers could visit an exhibit of engravings by Peter Breughel at the Kleeman Gallery on East 57th Street and take in 19th Century French masters at the Durand-Rand gallery on the same boulevard, which the WPA Guide to New York City called city's equivalent of Paris’s fashionable Rue de le Paix with its chic shops and galleries. On the west end of the street, Jackson Pollock, noted in the listings as “the wildest of the abstract expressionists,” a term Coates had coined, was showing at Art of This Century and Joseph Stella had a show at the Egan.The Wildenstein Gallery on East 64th was hosting a Gauguin show benefiting the New York Infirmary.The well-heeled also could pick up an Old Master at an auction at Parke-Bernet that week.
The Knoedler Gallery, which had been located in the heart of the 57th Street shopping and gallery strip since 1925, was celebrating its 100th anniversary and Brendan Gill of The New Yorker paid a visit to its retrospective for “Talk of the Town.” He noted that the nylon cord and line out front was a first for him at a gallery exhibition. This clearly was a popular show, representing a selection of art that had passed through the gallery over the preceding 100 years. The show was hung in the style of the Victorian era with the walls “plastered thick with paintings, tier on tier," according to Edward Alden Jewell of The New York Times. Gill noted that the first room was devoted to the early period including 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 meets Henschel, 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.
Coates reviewed the exhibit in the April 13 issue. He wrote that the Knoedler Gallery "now certainly the most august place in town, with the possible exception of St. John the Divine," was founded as print and artists' supply shop down on lower Broadway at Duane Street and had followed its patrons uptown in a series of moves.He found the show “amusing,” noting that the selection was uncritical with a lot of dross, reflecting the taste of the period, among the 100 works on display, but calling out Winslow Homer’s “The Dinner Bell” and Jasper F. Crospey’s “Wyoming” as among the better pieces.
The New York Times noted that many of the works on display were on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the New York Historical Society. In his April 3 review the Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell wrote that there was much in common between this show, including the mode of display, with the show at the Metropolitan, “The Taste of the Seventies.” He found that the “scene is at once gay, conglomerate and appalling…we stand aghast before the outspread evidence of the taste of our forebears." But he also noted the audible nostalgic sighs from some in the attendance. While the front room had attracted the most notice, the middle gallery included works by Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Frans Hals, Watteau, Hobbema, Ingres, Goya and Bronzino. Somewhat more "contemporary" artists such as Gericault, Longhi, Zurbaran, Oudry, Renoir, Corot, Courbet, Monet, Millet, Manet, Van Gogh and Winslow Homer were found in the third gallery. There was an exhibition of prints on the upper floor. A bigger event was scheduled for later in the year at the Metropolitan.