Art and Artists

J. B. Neumann, who gave up his lively New Art Circle some years ago to lecture on the Esthe tics and History of Art, has returned to the gallery field as co director of the Contempora New Art Circle at 509 Madison avenue The “Contempora” stands, I suppose, for the Architectural and Interior Decorating part of the gallery while the New Art Circle stands for Mr. Neumann.

The first exhibition opened with a display of recent paintings by Kuniyoshi, Max Weber and Arthur Dove.

The Kuniyoshis are amusing, as his paintings always are apt to be. They are the works of a talented, highly inventive and sophisticated personality who strives to be quaintly original. His little portrait is a lovely bit of painting. The intellectual abstractions of Arthur Dove on the other hand leave me, at least, entirely cold.

As for Max Weber, I remember seeing several of his paintings while I was a student at the National Academy of Design. They held me spellbound although I understand but little. They were strangely fascinating, attracting and repelling me. Since then I have always been on the lookout for his work and the more I saw the more I grew to like them.

Weber’s art opened my eyes to the shallowness and falseness of the academy and imbued in me a desire for self-expression and independent experimentation. In 1925 I wrote a glowing, youthfully enthusiastic appreciation of Max Weber and his art for which I was roundly teased and scoffed at by my fellow students. Since then, although I have gone through many periods in my artistic development with their concomitant influences my esteem and admiration for Max Weber has remained unalloyed.

The art of Weber is highly intellectual and emotional, sophisticated and religious. He possesses an extraordinary understanding of form in the structural and voluminous sense and a beautiful sense of color. His landscape, the Pine-Crees, is a veritable masterpiece ## and earthy, painted with a ## almost tactile regard for texture and surfaces.

ELIAS GROSSMAN

Elias M. Grossman, who is exhibiting his recent etchings at the Jewish Club, has become quite a lobe-trotter in his search for celebrities as models. They all posed for him—Einstein, Mussolini, {SPAN}##{/SPAN}, Gandhi. Portraiture is a most difficult art and more likeness does not make a good portrait. Although Grossman possesses an accurate eye for likeness and character he cannot compete with the faultless eye of the camera. This is why I prefer his informal studies of beggars and the simple unpretentious landscapes to his Mussolinis and Coliseums.