Exhibition’s Final Stop After Cold War Shutdown by Eve Kahn in the New York Times
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A short-lived traveling art show that caused an outcry in 1946 but that now looks tame has been meticulously reinstalled with documentation about how government maneuverings shut it down. “Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy,” an exhibition of paintings that the United States government briefly owned at the outset of the Cold War, opens on Saturday at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens in the final stop of a tour.
The State Department had bought about 150 paintings and, in the 1940s, planned to send them on propaganda world tours. The shows were meant to “exemplify the freedom of expression enjoyed by diverse artists in a democratic country,” Dennis Harper, a curator of the current show, writes in a catalog essay.
The artworks include landscapes and florals by major figures like Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield, Walt Kuhn, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe. The State Department commissioned J. LeRoy Davidson as the show’s main curator, who included the above, as well as slightly riskier abstract compositions, battle scenes, tenement streetscapes and portraits of impoverished Americans by Ben Shahn and Herman Maril.
Conservative politicians and journalists opposed the proposed tours, and hostile news clippings from the time are reproduced in the current show’s catalog. President Harry S. Truman described the art as “merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy people.” The New York Journal-American called it “weird junk.” Fred E. Busbey, a Republican congressman from Illinois, told the organizers that some participating artists were “definitely connected with revolutionary organizations.”
The government, after displaying the collection in a few politically unstable countries, including Cuba and Czechoslovakia, auctioned the paintings in their original frames for drastically less than their value. They were declared government surplus for a 1948 sale run by the War Assets Administration.
Institutions that bought some of the works in 1948, including museums at Auburn University and the University of Oklahoma, still own them and have already exhibited “Art Interrupted.” (The University of Georgia also acquired some of the works, and the showing at its Georgia Museum of Art is the final stop on a 20-month tour.) Other works turned up in improbable spots; the artist Sol Wilson’s painting of a Massachusetts fishing wharf was hanging at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn.
Descendants of Herman Maril, who contributed a 1944 watercolor of a barren Appalachian backyard to the State Department displays, did not realize that the painting had ended up at Auburn University’s museum. His son, David Maril, said in an interview that his father had sketched it while briefly serving as an art therapist to wounded soldiers in West Virginia.
A few months ago, Gregory Davidson, the son of the 1940s exhibition curator, told the “Art Interrupted” curators that his mother, Martha Davidson, had played a major but unrecognized role in choosing the works. His parents were both art historians, but his mother greatly admired the Hartley and O’Keeffe circles, while his father focused on Chinese and Indian art. “Modern art was never his thing,” Gregory Davidson said in an interview.
A few paintings that the Davidsons chose have changed hands in recent years. In 2011, Christie’s in New York sold pieces by Burchfield, Kuhn and Ralston Crawford (at prices between $22,000 and $60,000 each) that have been traveling with “Art Interrupted.”
The Kuhn painting is slated to be donated to Auburn’s museum. Ten paintings in the original Davidson roster, including works by Hartley and George Grosz, are still missing.
LOVELY TO SEE (AND SING)
Medieval monks and nuns sang Latin prayers at rigorously scheduled times of day, varying the routines only slightly, according to the season. Their handwritten scores on vellum assigned different vocal parts to men, women and choirboys. The page margins were filled with drawings of choirs, musicians and songbirds.
“Sacred Song: Chanting the Bible in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” an exhibition that opens on Friday at Les Enluminures gallery in New York, contains about 30 books of religious music (at prices from $5,000 to over $1 million per volume). The songs were written down between the 13th and 18th centuries for worshipers in Italy, Germany, France, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and Ethiopia.
Original leather bindings are studded with metal plaques and spikes that prevented wear. “It looks like it’s battle-ready,” Keegan Goepfert, a gallery director at Les Enluminures, said during a preview while leafing through a 1430s Italian choir book.
The erudite illustrators added hints of the latest scientific discoveries. In a Portuguese songbook, written around 1600, images along the margins look like Australian aboriginals and possibly a kangaroo.
Singers have updated the manuscripts over the years, adding suggestions for vocal phrasings and new liturgy. Some pages have been shuffled into incoherent order, however, and illuminations are missing. In the 1800s and early 1900s, army looters and book dealers dismantled music manuscripts into salable pieces.
Vellum leaves from music manuscripts are widely scattered in museums.
At the Cloisters in New York, a parchment sheet painted in Prague around 1405 for Benedictine services has saints and songbirds surrounding a prayer. (The page sold for $326,000 at Christie’s in London in 2012.) In “The Netherlandish Miniature, 1260-1550,” an exhibition through Dec. 7 at the Cleveland Museum of Art, a 1320s Flemish page that belonged to the 19th-century art critic John Ruskin is edged in tableaus of apostles about to be executed.
THE TINIEST TREASURES
Tiny paintings in old masters exhibitions attract tightly packed crowds, craning to see, so the North Carolina Museum of Art is preparing for rubbernecks at a show opening in October, “Small Treasures: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, and Their Contemporaries.”
The museum will show about 60 pieces no larger than a standard letter-size sheet, and magnifying equipment and projections of details will be on hand. The paintings were originally meant for “private consumption” rather than display, the curator Dennis P. Weller said in an interview.
A few institutions, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, have kept their smaller old masters works on view. At the recent Dutch artworks loan show at the Frick Collection in New York, clusters of visitors formed around the most diminutive works: Carel Fabritius’s “The Goldfinch” (which figures in Donna Tartt’s best-selling novel of the same title) and Jan Steen’s “Girl Eating Oysters.”
But museums rarely splurge on acquiring the paintings.
“If you’re going to have a Rembrandt, you want a big, juicy Rembrandt,” Mr. Weller said.
He is borrowing from institutions including the Rijksmuseum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, as well as from the private holdings of the Manhattan investor Thomas S. Kaplan, the Boston lawyer George S. Abrams and the Massachusetts investors Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo.
At old masters auctions coming up at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York, estimates start at a few thousand dollars each for religious scenes, landscapes and portraits of servants, lovers and aristocrats as small as the palm of your hand.