Open Season

Manhattan's art season is to U. S. art what the Broadway season is to the U. S. theatre. It started off with a mild pop last week when the renovated Whitney Museum, after a four-month delay, threw open its doors at last, revealing a fountain filled with goldfish in the lobby, four new galleries filled mostly with familiar U. S. moderns from the Museum's permanent collection.

Directors of the Whitney Museum did not know whether they were more tickled over their sensational new indirect lighting system, their four new rooms, a new central staircase and widened halls, or the 118 paintings, 53 pieces of sculpture, 31 water colors, 29 drawings and 57 prints by 20th Century American artists. Dawdling gallerygoers, who could scarcely tell when night fell as the concealed lights filled the rooms with an almost perfect synthetic daylight, were tickled with everything. They got a familiar pleasure from such standard brands as George Luks's gamey Mrs. Gamley, George Bellows' Dempsey and Firpo, John Sloan's Backyards, Greenwich Village, Charles Burchfield's Old House by the Creek, Max Weber's The Chinese Restaurant. Most of the 30 newly acquired works were new only to the Whitney Museum, added to the housewarming without spoiling the old home mood.

Biggest thing in the sculpture room was the late Gaston Lachaise's tiptoeing, steatopygous, nude, Standing Woman; one of the smallest was still the reductio ad absurdum of John B. Flannagan's solid, amusingly diminutive Elephant (see cut).

This week people who found the Whitney Museum's selection of 20th-century painting already turning tamely classic could rush off to the Associated American Artists' businesslike galleries, where to most of the 58 members of An American Group, Inc. classic was a fighting word. Their exhibition of paintings, sculpture and wood carvings was as up-to-the-minute as an air raid, often as violent and savage:

P:Sometimes they implied a misplaced sadism, like Louis Ribak's Leading Citizens, in which a chunky citizen in shirt sleeves bullwhips a nude man lashed to a tree trunk.

P:Sometimes they were a social-conscious emetic like Philip Evergood's painting of a walkathon in which it was hard to tell the epicene men from the epicene women staggering in various stages of rawly colored collapse.

P:Sometimes they were self-consciously obscure, like Anton Refregier's timely Invasion, in which a trio of Hieronymus Bosch-like monsters seem not to know what to do with a Soviet flag.

P:Adolf Dehn's lyrical Lake in the Mountains, Lucile Blanch's Mine in Clinch Mountains served as brave antidotes.

P:Ingenious was Aaron Goodelman's clothes-pinlike Kultur! (see cut).

A small exhibition at the Neumann-Willard Gallery (24 carefully selected pieces) combined old art and new with almost no jolts. A 15th-Century Christ in the Temple failed to clash with Marc Chagall's pinkish fantasy, Flowers in a Dream, Max Beckmann's strong modern Landscape with Factory or Clemente Orozco's un-Orozcolike The "El" Station.

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