On Art
LOTTMAN, HERBERT
ON ART Painters and Politics in Paris By Herbert Lottman Paris The French do not really enjoy their art when it is not laced with problems. Picasso had to be a Communist, as well as...
...Now 40, Orlando has refused to cultivate a true...
...This time the reference was to a pavilion put up in the Louvre gardens to house Marc Chagall's stained glass windows...
...In the main, France's avant garde holds to representational art and scorns the abstract...
...The same paper ran another page-one headline denouncing "A Chicken Coop Installed in the Tuileries...
...A leading weekly devoted a banner headline to a proposal for a museum of modern art to be built beneath the Tuileries gardens: "Halte au massacre des Tuileries...
...The French exhibition which recently opened in Moscow was to have included his work, but the Soviets, who now claim Chagall (and Vasily Kandinsky) as their own, vetoed the plan...
...Herbert Lottman is a Paris agent for Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
...Like Georges Mathieu, they can try to attract attention in new ways, and many are content with no more than that...
...One critic, noting that the windows are not merely juxtaposed bits of colored glass but true stained glass art, called the show "the great success of the year...
...Recently transported to New York, they will be on display at the Museum of Modern Art through January 3 and then will go on to Israel...
...More recently • The Government was put on the spot because a 17th century masterpiece by George de la Tour was sold to an American museum despite high-level objections...
...Cocteau hangs on by his ability to convey an aura of evil...
...Information Agency's cultural center only shows young abstracts in its contemporary shows...
...The Chagall windows are worth a pause...
...Picasso had to be a Communist, as well as the world's greatest improvisator...
...The new way, joining the party, lets the critics buy you...
...They portray the 12 tribes of Israel in symbols (candlesticks, fish, the Book of the Law...
...The 12 giant windows, all bright splashes of primary colors, were designed for the synagogue of the HadassahHebrew University Medical Center near Jerusalem...
...Peter Orlando, a young figurative painter, provides a case in point...
...For example, the best of the modern sculptors, Alberto Giacometti, has just had a one-man show, with several models but only one subject: the artist's search for reality through the study of recognized objects of nature...
...It is not surprising that the "great success of the year" in Paris adheres to the tradition of figurative painting...
...If anything, it is less abstract than the artist's earlier work...
...Nor will he try the new hucksterism, which consists of paying lip service to the French Communist party, although colleagues who have done so have had powerful critics, profitable galleries and a whole powerhouse of promotional devices at their service...
...Chagall's stained glass windows respect the Judaic prohibition of representing persons, but in every other respect are in the great tradition of this age-old French art...
...The Louvre has been the center of press discussion because various governmental agencies continue to occupy at least one wing needed to display the vast reserves of the museum now stored in cellars...
...Faced with the survival of the great generation (Picasso, Braque, Chagall) and of their immediate juniors (Giacometti, Zadkin), what can the young do...
...He has been a reverse victim of the controversy over the American abstract expressionist school: The U.S...
...For if those who care about such things were unanimous in their indignation at the "chicken coop"—Parisians know that temporary buildings can disfigure lovely sites for decades—there was nothing but praise for Chagall...
...The old path to success was to hire a gallery and to buy a certain number of critics...
...The two pacemaking art newspapers are edited, respectively, by an extreme Rightist and the Communist party's cultural gauleiter, former surrealist poet Louis Aragon...
...Honored in Paris, Chagall is still a question mark in Russia, the country of his birth...
...And at Auvers-sur-Oise, the lovely agricultural town not far from Paris where Van Gogh spent the last weeks of his life, the sculptor Zadkin's new statue of Van Gogh was unveiled in July...
...An American who has spent most of the post-World War II years in Paris, Orlando paints landscapes and still lifes in sober monotones...
...Or once they have found a true (gimmick), like Bernard Buffet, they can continue repeating themselves to the continued applause of their collectors and galleries...
Vol. 44 • November 1961 • No. 38
