A Loan From The USSR

...In all, this succinct little anthology has life...

...On close inspection, what at first appears to be a random selection?including Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Derain, Vlaminck, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Rousseau, and Leger-begins to take clear shape...

...This is a superb picture of two Tahitian girls sitting and reclining in ocher-and-khaki-colored glory on a sweet pink ground, with water and vegetation expressed in an undulating Japanese pattern in back...

...These, of course, are only the titillating highlights of what has undoubtedly been a most colorful and active life...

...The planes and contours of The Smoker, leaning on a table with bottles and fruit, are maneuvered most sculpturally, yet the figure's bulk and the background are no more than a couple of inches in depth...

...In this and in Still Life with Fruit, the shallow space is filled with shapes but never to the point of congestion, and his designs remind one of the photographic process of cropping...

...The earliest item is a Monet from 1867 and the latest a Leger from 1918, but the focus is on the span from the late 1880s to around 1910...

...Studying the lovely What, Are You Jealous?, one sees how queer Gauguin's primitive inspiration and radical ideas on composition must have seemed in his day...

...Hammer has reciprocated the present loan, however, by sending his own collection on a Soviet tour...

...Thus, the arrival of Cubism, in the form of three Picassos and a Braque is made to seem more logical than ever before...

...In the course of this project, Hammer met and became friends with Lenin, and eventually established a relationship with the Soviets that resulted in many "friendly cooperative gestures in business enterprises and art activities...

...Thus it was with the usual mixed feelings that one dodged around all the rapt heads, darting in whenever possible for a quick closer look through the bullet-proof glass...

...Among the former, one supposes, was being president of the A. Hammer Pencil Company in Moscow from 1925-30...

...One of the few northerners who reconciled drawing with painting brilliantly, he devoured the form of everything, whether a head, a hill or simply space, recreating it with these quivering strips of paint...

...Upon finding widespread starvation in the area, he "conceived the idea of buying a million bushels of American wheat," to be transported in ships that would return with Russian goods for sale...

...Altogether, the transaction and its background make a delicate fugue on the themes of art and business...

...The inspiration for the austere pictures-nudes presaging the later calligraphic style on a blank ground of one or two colors-came, Picasso once told Richardson, from Matisse's children: At the time they were learning to draw, and "their childish daubs showed their infinitely sophisticated father how to condense and simplify...

...It should be noted that Knoed-ler's connection with the USSR predates Hammer's chairmanship, for the company purchased more than 30 paintings from the Hermitage in 1929, at a cost of $12 million, and some of these went to the National Gallery...

...In his concise and helpful notes for the exhibition, John Richardson, vice-president of Knoedler, points out that Matisse "went almost as far as he could in the direction of austerity" in the first decade of the century, simultaneously indulging "his passion for florid patterns and arabesques...

...the art activities, on the other hand, included the acquisition of "treasures" for the sale of which he started his own gallery...

...Monet and Renoir, though not sensationally represented, look very much the old masters they had become-comfortable, assured and high-priced...

...In addition, he wrote a book entitled In Quest of the Romanoff Treasure (1936...

...But the 74-year-old doctor has long been prominent in the banking and business world, both in his current position and as the former president and chairman of a distillery, and he has undertaken a number of humanitarian endeavors as well...

...His concern for solidity notwithstanding, the results are equally powerful in their flat patterning, as with Gauguin...

...Given our conditioning, Gauguin and Van Gogh should appear likewise, yet they actually regain some of their revolutionary stature...

...One could not help thinking o?our own relatively "neglected" specimens while marveling at how art, like houseplants, seems to glow with a new life under the blaze of public attention...

...Awe-inspiring as this change in vision is-and it gives the appearance of being more an organic mutation in the human race than an effort of intellect by a few individuals-Matisse's independence is what stands out most start-lingly in the show...

...All these men were at work by 1910, whether at the beginning, the climax or the end of their careers...

...He is also chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Occidental Petroleum, whose business he has been expanding in the USSR...

...His debts to Gauguin and Cezanne are not that obvious in two 1901 still-lifes, there being little or no deformation of space...

...Most impressive is his search for precise equivalencies of color: In the smaller of the two paintings there is a pear, whose two yellows, one illuminated and one in shadow, are perfection, as is the non-Impressionist use of a purple shadow on a bluish-purple cloth...

...Though this imparted an unusually festive air to the occasion, it was a little reminiscent of the unveiling of one of the Metropolitan's staggering^ expensive purchases-The difference being that the attraction was not so much the amount of money represented by the art as the spirit of Hammer's much-publicized triumph...

...Their presence is a personal coup for Dr...

...they will return home in early fall...

...what has become so fossilized by the telling and retelling in art history courses is here very easily perceived as a lively reality...

...Hammer made his first visit to the Soviet Union in the early '20s, after graduating from Columbia University Medical School...

...The New York showing attracted many students, artists and aficionados, but the majority were obviously not regular gallery-goers, and they had brought their children and invalid relatives for the once-in-a-Iifetime event...

...On Art A LOAN FROM THE USSR BY VIVIEN RAYNOR he major art event this spring has been the arrival of 41 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings on loan from the Soviet Union's Hermitage and Pushkin Museums...

...The latest Matisse in this show is the 1913 portrait of his wife, an overlifesize seated figure in mostly grays and greens, that does indeed pick up where Cezanne left off...

...Until now, Hammer has done nothing particularly notable in the art field, either at Knoedler or at the prosperous-looking Hammer Galleries on 57th Street, where he shares ownership with his brother...

...Armand Hammer, chairman of the board of the M. Knoedler & Company Gallery, who arranged the show...

...For example, I was struck by the lack of promise shown in the early Picassos: One approximation of a Lautrec woman with absinthe is really awful...

...Taken together, their work actively illustrates the transition of epochs...

...True, he was only about 20 at the time, but such efforts suggest the legends of youthful precocity could stand some revision...

...One could describe this World War I phase as the only time the painter was depressed, but it was a depression of requiem-like proportions...

...According to the press release for the exhibition, he went to the Ural Mountains to help in a typhus epidemic...

...Similarly, Van Gogh steps forward anew-in Portrait of Doctor Rey and Cottages, Auvers-not as the deranged inspiration of history and fiction but as an artist who waded into a canvas with a methodical intensity...

...And there are a couple of beautiful Derain landscapes-Still fairly Fauve in 1906 and 1907?that make one wonder why he is always left out in the cold of lesser masterdom...

...The march away from the illusion of deep space is continued in the works of Cezanne, who wanted to "make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of museums...

...Even if he had not gone on to be one of the two great innovators of the century, the examples on display of his lush early work would be remarkable on their own merits...

...That an American businessman with whom Lenin could be friendly should have been instrumental in bringing out the impounded masterpieces is a small irony, compounded by their enormous success in the U.S.: Some 250,000 people attended the Washington debut...

...Most of the pictures from the USSR belonged originally to Sergei Shchukin, a wealthy Russian textile importer who, like the Stein family, was a pioneer collector of modern French art...

...He was, incidentally, the subject of a portrait drawing by Matisse...

...First exhibited at Washington's National Gallery and then at Knoedler in New York, the pictures are presently circulating around the country by way of the Los Angeles County Museum, the Chicago Art Institute and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth...

...His property was nationalized, along with Ivan Morozov's -also represented here-in 1918...

...If not a multimasterpiece blockbuster, the exhibition is nonetheless quite worthwhile and instructive in a way one would not have thought possible...

...It was also the start of a very somber period that produced some majestic interiors and landscapes, which we rarely have a chance to see...

...That the good offices of commerce, plus the fluctuations of political attitudes, should have combined to make art history vaguely human for once, and therefore accessible, was perhaps the subtlest and most satisfactory of all the ironies in the show...

...It has almost the trompe l'oeil effect of a very low bas relief...