The Human Touch

MY LEGS ached, my head was weak — I said was — and there was a colored blur before my eyes. I tried to get my quarter’s worth in one afternoon, and I got so much more that it hurt. I might have achieved something like the same effect by looking steadfastly at a flickering screen for two hours without taking the trouble to sit down, even though there were chairs about. No, on second thought, it wasn’t as bad as that, but on the basis of my experience I can## tell you that if you want to see the First Municipal Art Exhibition at Rockefeller Centre in one session and on one quarter, go into training for a time and when you arrive at the R.C.A. Building bright and chipper, check your rubbers, overcoat, hat and parcels; then start to examine the first “mile of art” ever to be assembled under one roof in New York City, or as much of it as holds the eye.

As for me, I shall have to retrun some time to look again at the pictures that struck my fancy. There are quite a number, not necessarily by Jews. Mr. Jewell of The Times has suggested three visits, but I think I shall be able to do it in two. After you’ve seen, let us say, one-half of the oils, water colorings, drawings, lithographs, etchings and sculptures, why you won’t have to look at pictures for another year. About five hundred painters and printmakers and sculptors are represented and although this does not make it an extremely exclusive exhibition, neither is it as inclusive as you might suppose. For there are quite a number of good artists who are not represented and, of course, many bad ones. And as for the bad ones in the exhibition, you can always spot them by listening–yes, by listening. You don’t even have to know anything about art. Whenever and wherever you hear an old lady gurgle at a picture something like: How charming, how colorful, you may bet a quarter that she’s looking at a Saturday Evening Post cover, or something very much like it. But side by side with the most awful junk you may find art so utterly advanced, so unfoundedly sur-realiste that you can see the judges did not select according to any narrow standard. But it is just as possible for advanced art to be bad as it is for the pretty-pretty art, although more people will be intimated into silence by the advance guard while they will feel perfectly free to utter their contempt for the poster effects.

There are approximately 500 artists whose work hangs on the walls of The Forum of the R.C.A. Building and is disposed in the sculpture gallery. A number of the artists are Jews, quite a number. So far as art exhibitions in New York are concerned, I do not think that anyone can justly contend that there is anti-Semitism. Jews are elected to the National Academy, as non-Jews are, and there are other Jewish artists, perhaps too good for the National Academy, who have the right and the privilege of not putting N.A. after their names. But many as are the Jews whose work hangs in Radio City, I think you will look long and hard to find any semblance of a “Jewish art.” Take William Auerbach-Levy, the well known etcher, as an example. He’s always etching old Jews, but in this exhibition he has only one such drypoint, titled Devotion There’s nothing Jewish about Morris Kantor’s pictures and Bernard Karfiol and Leon Kroll, as they usually do, extol the glory of feminine flesh. In fact, the most typically Jewish thing in the whole exhibition is an etching done by a man bearing the unexpected name of William C. McNulty. The etching is titled Orchard Street. Doris Rosenthal has a beauty of a picture at the show, the interior of a garret studio, seen from its topmost height. Ivan Olinsky’s beautiful Soire Intime has been done by a Swede. Perhaps you may see something Jewish about Max Weber’s wide and stumpy female figures, but for the life of me I cannot, although it is just such pictures as these which have earned for Weber the obloquoy of belonging to the “Oy. Oy” school of painting.

There are Maurice Becker with his anti-militarist, anti-Rockefeller painting, done in the manner of a Socialist poster; Peter Blume, who can put mad ideas into exquisite color; Robert Brackman, an up and coming young painter; Louis Ferstadt, Arnold Friedman, whom I identify with winter landscapes; Harry Gottlieb, a very fine composer on canvas; Bernar Gussow, and–I hope he’s a Jew–William Meyerowitz, whose New England Landscape you should not overlook. Not being a loud thing, it does not command attention, in the way a raw picture may, but I feel you’ll like it the more you look at it.

Then there are Ben Benn and among others, two sculptors who proclaim their race in their names, Ahron Ben-Shmuel and Chaim Gross, not to mention the more polished Jo Davidson. Nor should one overlook Theresa Bernstein. There is a Rosenberg and a couple of Roths, not to mention a Rosen, but I dislike to pin the yellow badge on artists who may not be Jews and whose subject matter, at all events, is certainly not Jewish. I urge you, however, not to overlook Simka Simkovitch and if Florine Stetheimer’s To the Memory of P. T. Barnum does not amuse, ignore it. She is the artist lady who did the settings for the Stein-Thomson opera, “Three Saints in Four Acts.”

Anyway, Mayor LaGuardia derived some well-earned fun out of the exhibition. He declared last Tuesday evening when he threw it open to the public that this was the first job as Mayor he had had that gave him any pleasure and he put his money where his mouth was–as an old country saying has it. He bought himself twenty pictures, not paintings, but prints, which makes him a collector. New York has had Mayors ever since it was New Amsterdam, but this old town had to wait until 1934 until one LaGuardia said to the artists of New York, “Come on, boys, show us what you’ve got.” It’s too bad, of course, that so many of the left wing artists, revolting at the destruction of the Rivera mural, refused to show their works in the very building in which this so-called vandalism had been committed. I understand that a competing exhibition is being arranged by artists not represented in this show. The more the merrier; at least the second show won’t be a mile long.