Notes on Painting and Sculpture

Comments on the Current Exhibitions in New York

RUTH de ROCHEMONT

WITH the coming of late October, the art galleries of New York throw off their summer lethargy and prepare to show to the world the accomplishment of the artists during those months when the brushes of painters are busy and the art galleries are empty. The opening of the season is marked, this year, by a number of exhibitions of more than usual interest.

"Art beyond the rocks," will constitute one of the most important of these early exhibitions at the Ehrich Galleries. This exhibition,, which will open early in November, will show the work of French and English painters who have passed beyond the complications of Cubism—rather as children pass beyond the age of scarlatina— and are now painting with renewed vigor in a manner fresh, individual, and expressive, but free from the determined eccentricities of the ultramodern school. This, of course, is the thing to which all of us who have not been swept away by the sudden tide of modernism have looked forward, the hope which has led us to search, sometimes with encouraging results, the works of even the most depressing of the extremists. How far the hope will be fulfilled in the collection to be shown in November remains to be seen.

PORTRAITS of gardens, a type work which has acquired quite exceptional interest in the past seasons, will form a novel exhibition at the Feragil Galleries from about the middle of November. With the development of country estates in America gardening has become increasingly a hobby of the smart world, and in recent years owners of beautiful gardens have found a new delight in having that beauty transmuted and perpetuated by the art of the painter. Never before, it would seem, have gardens been so decoratively suited to such representation. That new colour sense, which is one of the most definite accomplishments of modernist art, the new feeling for the massing, balancing, and blending of colours, clear and vivid and unexpected or softly brilliant and striking, has been frankly adopted by the modern garden, and nature, which knows no combinations too brilliant for harmony, has biossomed with a new glory.

Giving back to art that which they have borrowed from it, these gardens have in turn become the subjects of canvases of rare loveliness. Melchers, Anderson, Childe Hassam, Carle Blenner, and many other artists of note have found them subjects wonderfully suited to their mood, and the finest these works, carefully selected by jury chosen for the purpose, are to be found in this collection, which will presented under the auspices of the Garden Club of America, from Novemher 14 to December 12.

In the first exhibitions of the autumn, one may always be sure that landscape and seascape will be generously represented. After all, why be an artist—especially an American artist -if one may not spend the glorious days of summer in the. open? Is it not, perhaps, a bit like the ancient art of angling, the most perfect of excuses for retiring to untroubled contemplation of wind and rain, and sun and sea. It is to the sea, sun-soaked or stormbeaten, that George Luks has taken his vigorous brush this summer, and the proof that action followed contemplation is at present being presented at the Kraushaar Galleries. Something of a departure from the more familiar work of this artist, these scenes along the Maine coast have a rugged beauty and a depth of color which promise well for the new phase of his art.

A SECOND, no less cogent reason for visiting these galleries is sup plied by a contemporary exhibition of prints, which includes lithographs by Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec and la Tour, anY etchings by Whistler, Legros, and the more recent Bauer, who, for all his success in that difficult and delicate medium, has of late abandoned it for oils. More recent and distinctively modern phases of the medium are also to be seen here in the work of such men s Sloan and Mahonri Young.

An artist new to the exhibition galieries is Harold Weston, whose "premiere" at the Montross Gallery wiu open the tenth of November. His work( which is marked by imaginative quality of a high order, a touch of the poet's temperament in the artist, con$jsts ]argeiy 0f landscapes in the Adjrondack region, a theme not to be outworn by repeated development at the hands of American landscape painters 0f four generations or more. In effective contrast are a group of drawjngS 0f Syrian life, a record of the observations of the artist's eye and the skill of his hand during the years 0f the war.

An exhibition of the work of Charles Hawthorne, which in recent years has gained notably in flexibility and breadth, wjthout losing its older virtues, will repiace) the first of the month, one q{ those general collections showing the summer's accomplishment of vari0U9 American painters, which is now on view at the Macbeth Gallery. Hawthorne has devoted the summer to portrait studies, a work to which he has in the past brought a charm and an admirable technique that have given him a prominent place among modern painters in that field and even at times brought forth the suggestion that he p0ssesses a number of the qualities which have given lasting fame to the work 0f painters of older generations, a suggestion which is recalled by this latest collection of his work,

ART in the Near East has this summer held much of the atten0f. the Kingore Galleries, who have made extensive personal investigations ⅛ these habitats of painters and sculptors of unpronouncable names and one may expect during the coming season some specimens of the artistic activity 0f such unfamiliar countries as Serbia, Bohemia, and Bulgaria. It may even be hoped that we shall see something like a representative exhibition of the work of that amazing Serbian, Mestrovie, whose heroic genius has so far been scarcely more than glimpsed in an occasional bit of sculpture.