The Art Collection of FDR
(Art Digest, 1936)
A printable paragraph from the 1936 pages of Art Digest explaining the aesthetic tastes of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his art collection.
The Art Digest
Articles from The Art Digest
Color Television: Hand Maiden to Art…
(Art Digest, 1945)
Attached you will read a 1945 editorial written by the art critic Clayton Boswell, who articulately expressed the great hope that the art world had emotionally invested in color television:
This is what the art world has been waiting for – in the meantime struggling with the futility of attempting to describe verbally visual objects over the air. Now art on the television will be on par footing with music. And what radio has done in spreading the appreciation of good music will be duplicated with fine art…Then indeed will Andrew Carnegie’s dream of progress through education come true.
Andrew Mellon’s Gift
(Art Digest, 1937)
A 1937 news column announced the very generous gift to Washington, D.C. and the nation made by billionaire philanthropist Andrew W. Mellon (1855 — 1937): The National Gallery of Art:
A long, low, classic structure, tailored in lines that harmonize with the neighboring white Beaux-Arts buildings, will house the new National Gallery made possible for the nation’s capital by Andrew W. Mellon. The plans, designed by John Russell Pope
(The cost was actually $10,000,000)
Click here to read additional articles from the Twenties and Thirties about art.
MoMA Purchased Paintings from the Degenerate Art Exhibit(Art Digest, 1939)
The art that Hitler has exiled as ‘degenerate’ is finding ready homes in other lands that have not yet been culturally crushed beneath the heel of Europe’s twin tyrannies: Fascism and Communism. Because Hitler has embraced the calendar decoration as the supreme art form, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been able to acquire five works that formerly were housed in prominent museums.
The article lists the purchased works.
MoMA Purchased Paintings from the Degenerate Art Exhibit(Art Digest, 1939)
The art that Hitler has exiled as ‘degenerate’ is finding ready homes in other lands that have not yet been culturally crushed beneath the heel of Europe’s twin tyrannies: Fascism and Communism. Because Hitler has embraced the calendar decoration as the supreme art form, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been able to acquire five works that formerly were housed in prominent museums.
The article lists the purchased works.
MoMA Purchased Paintings from the Degenerate Art Exhibit(Art Digest, 1939)
The art that Hitler has exiled as ‘degenerate’ is finding ready homes in other lands that have not yet been culturally crushed beneath the heel of Europe’s twin tyrannies: Fascism and Communism. Because Hitler has embraced the calendar decoration as the supreme art form, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been able to acquire five works that formerly were housed in prominent museums.
The article lists the purchased works.
New York Exhibit for Le Corbusier
(Art Digest, 1946)
A brief art review from 1946 announcing an exhibition of paintings, drawings, photographs, architectural plans and models by the modern architect Le Corbusier (né Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, 1887 – 1965) at the Mezzanine Gallery in Rockefeller Center.
Along with Ozenfant, Le Corbusier invented Purism. The earliest painting in the collection, and the only one of that period (1920), which is familiar to art audiences as part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Grant Wood: Iowa as Muse
(Art Digest, 1936)
An art review of the American painter, Grant Wood (1891 – 1942), and his efforts to illustrate a 1935 children’s book titled Farm on the Hill
Wood, a reigning member of the Regionalism School in American art, had come into the public eye some six years earlier with the creation of his painting, American Gothic, is quoted in this article concerning his creative process and the importance his vision of Iowa plays while painting:
…Mr Wood seceded from the neo-meditationists of Paris because when he began to meditate he realized that ‘all the really good ideas I’d ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.’
Click here to read a 1942 article by Rockwell Kent on the proper roll of American artists during wartime.
Nazi Art Criticism
(Art Digest, 1936)
A few vile words concerning modernism and Jewish artists by a forgotten Nazi art critic named L.A. Schutze:
The only one who has created an art entirely born out of the Talmudistic spirit is Picasso, heir of Arabian decorative artists or the Jewish cabalists of Spain.
Click here to read about the contempt that the Nazis had for Modern Art.
The First N.Y. Exhibit of Paris Art Made During the Occupation
(Art Digest, 1946)
Recent paintings from Paris have been brought to New York by Pierre Matisse (1900 – 1989) and are now on view at his 57th Street Gallery [at the Fuller Building]. Represented are the Pierre Bonnard, Jean Dubuffet, Andre Marchand, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault.
The Bauhaus Exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art
(Art Digest, 1938)
To mark the opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1938 exhibition, Bauhaus 1919 – 1928, the over-paid editors at ART DIGEST published this single page review for it’s American readers explaining what the art school was, why it closed and what was in the mind of the school’s founder, Walter Gropius (1883 – 1969):
The Bauhaus program proceeded to teach students manual dexterity, in all the crafts, to investigate the laws of the physical world, to plumb the spiritual world, and to master the machine. Out of the Bauhaus came the first experiments in tubular furniture, in modern typography, in modern lighting, and many significant developments in architecture, photography, abstract art, textile and other crafts.
Click here to read unfavorable criticism about the Bauhaus exhibit.
Artist Paul Cadmus
(Art Digest, 1937)
A late Thirties art review of Paul Cadmus (1906 – 1999), one of the finest and most scandalous artists of the W.P.A.:
Paul Cadmus was thrust into national prominence at the age of 26 when his canvas, ‘The Fleets In’, painted for PWAP in 1933, stirred up a storm of protest. Since then controversies have dogged his art but with them has come recognition…Like the contemporary writers Thomas Wolfe and Aldous Huxley the reaction of Cadmus against present day ‘civilization’ is one of repulsion tinged with hatred. This note of protest seems to be the battle cry of the younger generation of artists and writers. Mrs Overdressed Middle class to be viewed by the public…
Fashion Journalism Goes Legit
(Art Digest, 1936)
Keeping abreast with current need, the Traphagan School (New York) offers for the first time a course in fashion journalism, which prepares students for positions on magazines and newspapers in advertising departments and agencies where they will interpret in words what they themselves or some other designer relates. The course is conducted by Marie Stark, formerly associate editor of Vogue…
Bauhaus Exhibit Smeared by Critics
(Art Digest, 1939)
With all the best wishes in the world, it is impossible to suppress the feeling that there is something essentially heavy, forced and repellent in most of the Bauhaus work. They are under suspicion of being modern for the sake of being modern and not because of any necessities of their system of living.
-so wrote the well-respected art critic Henry McBride (1867 – 1962) in response to the groundbreaking 1938 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Bauhaus 1919 – 1928. McBride did not mince words in expressing his belief that the Bauhaus was not a genuine art school and that the MoMA showed poor judgment by lamenting it’s passing. McBride is remembered as having been a longtime advocate of modernism, a champion of the 1913 Armory Show, and supporter of the new and untried, but for him, the Bauhaus represented the art of the poseur.
Bauhaus Exhibit Smeared by Critics
(Art Digest, 1939)
With all the best wishes in the world, it is impossible to suppress the feeling that there is something essentially heavy, forced and repellent in most of the Bauhaus work. They are under suspicion of being modern for the sake of being modern and not because of any necessities of their system of living.
-so wrote the well-respected art critic Henry McBride (1867 – 1962) in response to the groundbreaking 1938 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Bauhaus 1919 – 1928. McBride did not mince words in expressing his belief that the Bauhaus was not a genuine art school and that the MoMA showed poor judgment by lamenting it’s passing. McBride is remembered as having been a longtime advocate of modernism, a champion of the 1913 Armory Show, and supporter of the new and untried, but for him, the Bauhaus represented the art of the poseur.
Max Beckman Since the War
(Art Digest, 1946)
Max Beckmann (1884 – 1950), having fled to Holland from his native Germany in order to escape Hitler, arrived in New York shortly after the end of the war and wasted no time in securing an aggressive dealer eager to arrange liasons between him and the the post-war dollar.
The first exhibition of Max Beckman’s work since 1941 is currently being held at the Bucholz Gallery in New York. Director Kurt Valentin has assembled for this event important examples of Beckman’s brush dating from 1939 to the present…Among the many drawings particularly remembered are a satirical ‘Radio Singer’ and a tongue-in-cheek ‘Anglers’, along with ‘Head Waiters’.
Stuart Davis: Thirty Years of Evolution
(Art Digest, 1945)
A review of the Stuart Davis (1892 – 1964) retrospective that opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1945. The artist referred to his influences:
In my own case I have enjoyed the dynamic American scene for many years, and all my pictures (including the ones I painted in Paris) are referential to it. They all have their originating impulse in the impact of [the]contemporary American environment.
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.