1936

Articles from 1936

The Industrial Visions of Paul R. Meltsner
(Art Digest, 1936)

The artist Paul R. Meltsner (1905 – 1966) was one of many WPA artists given to depicting sweaty, mal-nourished proletarians laboring in the fore-ground of smoke-plagued, industrial cityscapes and his work can be found today in the vaults of every major American museum. This is a 1936 art review covering his one-man show at the Midtown Galleries in New York:

Meltsner builds his pictures everyday scenes of industrial life, dedicating them to labor and the machine…He gets broad vitality in his forms and force in his compositions, relieving at the same time the usual drabness of such scenes by a tonic of color.


Another 1936 article about Paul Meltsner can be read here.

Dada at MOMA
(Literary Digest, 1936)

An amusing, if blasphemous, art review of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 Dada and Surrealism exhibit.
The journalist oddly credited Joan Miro as the author of the Dada movement.

The Marx Brothers of the art world are displayed, in all their unrestrained glory, in an exhibition of Fantastic Art in New York this week.

An exhibition of this type is always easy prey for the practical joker. A similar show in Paris several years ago exhibited a shovel, submitted by a well-known but discontented artist as an example of perfect symmetry.


Click here to read about the contempt that the Nazis had for Modern Art.

‘Some of My Best Friends Are Jewish”
(Literary Digest, 1936)

Jews are like everybody else, only more so.’
So clicked the typewriter of the epigrammatic Dorthy Thompson (1893 – 1961), syndicated columnist and wife of Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951)’.

‘Are they?’ queried Robert Gessner (1913 – 1978), twenty-nine-year-old instructor of English at New York University. ‘Then why are they so persecuted?’

‘To answer his own question, the young Michigan-born Jew traveled to Europe, saw Hitler-swayed Jews march from meetings shouting ‘Down with us! Down with Us! Less fantastic were his experiences in Poland, Palestine, the Soviet Union and England…’

The Advance on the Rhineland and Other Forebodings
(Stage Magazine, 1936)

One of the very few literati who recognized what a German military presence in the Rhineland meant was a one legged American veteran of the last war named Laurence Stallings (1894 – 1968). This article appeared to be about the great benefit afforded to us all by hard working photo-journalists who supplied us daily with compelling images of various far-flung events, but it was in all actuality a warning to our grand parents that the world was becoming a more dangerous place.

I think the unforgettable picture of the month will come from shots stolen near a French farmhouse by Strasbourg, when the French were countering Hitler’s move into the Rhineland…Routine were the crustacean stares of the Italian children in gas masks last week, where they practiced first aid against chlorine and mustard barrages…

20th Century Artists Rediscover Woodcut Printing
(Art Digest, 1936)

An art review concerning a 1936 Brooklyn Museum exhibit of woodcut prints by avant-garde German, Russian and French artists. The reviewer details how the medium was rediscovered.

Before Franz Marc (1880 – 1916) was killed in the war he strengthened woodcut design in his departure from pretty and representational decoration toward more rugged abstraction…Almost all of these German, Russian and Frenchmen have concentrated their attention on human life. There is no pretty landscape, no picturesque architectural rendering, no still life, no sporting print. Froma a few prints the actual human form has been abstracted. One of these by Wassily Kandinsky ‘looks like a diagram of the contents of a madman’s waste basket’. The rest of the prints are chiefly tragic, mostly pitiful, occasionally derisive comments on the failure of man as an animal.

Modigliani: Appreciated at Last
(Art Digest, 1936)

In his lifetime Amedeo Modigliani‘s (1884 – 1920) was only honored one time with his own solo showing in an art gallery; many of his paintings were given away in exchange for meals in restaurants and he died the death of a pauper in some unglamorous corner of Paris. In the years that followed the art world began to learn about Modigliani bit by bit through art reviews like the one attached herein. Written sixteen years after his death, this is a review of a Modigliani exhibit at the avant-garde gallery of Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan in New York City:

C.J. Bulliet (1883 – 1952) in ‘Apples and Madonnas’ declared that Modigliani’s nudes may be ranked ultimately with the great ones of all time – with Giorgione’s ‘Sleeping Venus’, Titian’s ‘Venus Awake’, Goya’s ‘Maja’ (nude and even more impudently clothed), with Manet’s sensational wanton in the Louvre.’

NBC and CBS Open Shop on the West Coast
(Literary Digest, 1936)

In order to take advantage of the local talent abiding in the sleepy film colony of Hollywood, the far-seeing executives at NBC and CBS saw fit to open radio and television broadcasting facilities in that far, distant burg.

The trek to Hollywood of the Broadcasting companies began in earnest last winter when the National Broadcasting Company opened a large building – fire-proof, earthquake-proof, sound-proof and air-conditioned.

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