CONTRAST IN BRUSSELS

...the section devoted to Soviet women is dominated by a sign which proclaims, "More than 5.5 million women have received honorific titles and have been decorated with orders and medals glorifying maternity...

...The dishes offered include hamburgers, hot dogs, pastrami sandwiches, corned beef, banana splits, and apple pie...

...An Italian waiter commented that he much preferred the American pavilion because he had an uncle in the States and thus was in a position to understand it...

...The American press has adopted the terms "hard sell" and "soft sell" to describe the difference...

...Placed on a terrace of the balcony, the display consists of three structures, supposedly symbolic of the pioneers' covered wagons, the first with its walls in an accordion shape, the second somewhat less crumpled, and the last perfectly flat...

...The Russian pavilion is like a fast talking huckster, shouting the names, prices, and virtues of his wares to the accompaniment of a brass band and dancing girls, while a team moves through the crowd handing out free samples and literature...

...Outdrawing even Circarama is the fashion show...

...not a chance is missed to drive home the sales talk...

...The sophistication of the American pavilion, rather, is of the world of hi-fi, Vogue magazine, the Family of Man, and the Whitney Museum, trademarks of the aspirations of middle and upper middle class society...

...on the surface, at least, the disclaimers are correct...

...the Canadians offer a jet motor...

...The combination of the technical wonder of the medium, the unashamed flag-waving of the content, and the background music, America, is, even for the blase, a tremendous experience...

...But as with many of the other displays, the assumption is that the visitors to the American production are coming equipped with some fixed ideas about our country...

...The Russians haven't yet reached our slightly self-conscious attitude concerning worldly possessions...

...Nothing is underplayed about the 360 degree Circarama film, which starts with a picture of the Statue of Liberty, ends with the Golden Gate, and in between pictures Vermont, the Grand Canyon, the Great Plains, and the University of California...

...The health section is complete with a model ambulance and a display of surgical instruments...

...Hour after hour, high-style mannequins march down to the island and up again, fascinating an audience often lined up four or five deep...

...The section devoted to radio and television includes some 30 television sets and an equal number of radio phonographs, one of which was heard playing Mr...

...The American pavilion is so quiet that one may not get the idea at all...

...Not only is the overall Soviet presentation geared to "the millions," like a Sears, Roebuck catalogue...

...Such a presentation must assume that the visitor already knows the background material and is willing to make the effort to fit the offerings into a unified whole...

...References to our industrial system, to our level of production, and so on, have been consciously played down...

...The American pavilion, more sophisticated, will rather impress the intellectuals...

...The food department includes a whole case filled with nothing but bagels in a variety of sizes and another stacked with cans of caviar...

...But for the average visitor, the murals have little meaning and go practically unnoticed...

...Even more typically, the coffee is usually cold, the prices are high, the beer is in cans, and the atmosphere hurried and noisy...

...Regardless of the proclaimed intentions of the participants, however, the visitors that jam "the tractor factory" and "the drum," as the neighboring pavilions have been dubbed, are most certainly aware that they have come to compare the two world contenders...

...While the major item of outdoor landscaping at the American exhibit is a reflecting pool, with a fountain playing over a revolving free-form sculpture, surrounded by 130 apple trees, the Russians have decorated their grounds with an oil derrick, a model of a coal mine, tractors, trucks, earth scrapers, and other heavy machinery...

...The Americans, while certainly more appealing, practically ignore the fields of good books, magazines beyond the level of Life and Glamour, education, and the like...

...The Russians frankly appeal to old-fashioned proletarian sentiment, and the Americans, in the gray flannel sense, are unashamedly bourgeois...

...The Russian pavilion is overpowering...

...There is room to sit down and relax...

...A French storekeeper, however, with only one hurried day and no time to search around corners, offered the popular description, "the empty box," and a Belgian workman wondered where we had hidden the industrial display...

...A working color television station broadcasts folk singers, interviews with celebrities, and animal cartoons...

...In the words of one Belgian, the question is, "Would you prefer to be where women are dressed in fashions and bathing suits, or where they work in factories and get hero medals...

...They have two ideas to push: the ascendancy of the Soviet industrial power and the reason for that ascendancy— their version of Marxist philosophy...

...the Israelis post a map of their country which includes the Gaza Strip and Palestinian Jordan...

...The main object of the silver and gold exhibit hall seems to be neither to impress nor educate, but merely to show the world that Americans are nice people, and to get across some understanding of American values concerning the good life...

...In the words of the French Observateur, "The Russian pavilion is incontest-ably more impressive, more rich, above all for the crowds...

...And, if a national pavilion is supposed to translate to the world something about the nation's understanding of its way of life and aspirations, the American display, despite its lack of organization, does as well as should be expected...

...It is slick, low pressure, and in excellent taste—certainly more palatable than the nouveau Russians with their tedious facts and figures...

...In the first section, the problems of racial discrimination, conservation of natural resources, and urban development are presented through newspaper headlines...

...in the second, photographs show how Americans supposedly work to solve their problems...

...The Soviet structure is not only the biggest of the national exhibits...

...A British engineer, "bored with tools and tractors," was "more interested in learning how people live than how they work...

...A ramp leads from a balcony of the pavilion to an island in the lagoon in the center of the main exhibit floor...

...The biggest crowds are drawn to the Soviet and American pavilions, which squeeze between them a peppermint structure housing the comSIGMUND BECK, a recent graduate of Swarthmore College and formerly vice chairman of Students for Democratic Action, is currently traveling in Europe...

...The combination has a strange appeal, nevertheless, and despite incredibly fast service—at least by European standards—customers are lined up outside nearly every hour of the day...

...If the exterior of the pavilion is an unmistakable symbol, the interior is a temple of devotion to the Soviet image of man's potential...

...Instead, the American pavilion includes a drug store soda fountain, a newsstand, a "children's creative center," and a "face of America" display with such objects of Americana as a slab from a California redwood tree, a child's beanie with a helicopter on the top, a box with three tumbleweeds, and some photos of Abraham Lincoln...

...He didn't know, however, if the man in the street could do the same...

...We need mature works, having clear forms...

...it is piled high with hundreds of items on every conceivable subject, and includes a stand where the interested may purchase a copy of Lenin's On Social Democracy and Democratic Revolution for 14 cents or assorted works of Engels for 52 cents, as well as children's books—translated into several languages—for as little as 10 cents...

...In contrast, the central theme chosen by the U.S...

...pavilion's planners is how Americans live...

...There is even a display devoted to Soviet trade unions, which, in the words of the bilingual poster, "fight for the development of production and for the amelioration of the conditions of work and of the life of the workers...

...After climbing the marble stairway and entering the foyer, the visitor is face to face with an immense statue of Lenin weighing more than 20 tons, two equally heroic statues of a man and woman worker, and a duplicate of the earth satellite Sputnik...

...Just who the "intellectuals" are is another matter...

...The Dutch show us a potato sorter and a model farm...

...Art is given due respect, but a display which consists of Indian folk art, early American folk art, and non-representational painting and sculpture appears merely precious rather than intellectually honest...

...While the various items are interesting in themselves, no attempt has been made to draw them together...

...and at the end of a long hall devoted to explaining their national tradition the British have hung an oil portrait of Queen Elizabeth...

...Two Turkish businessmen preferred the American pavilion "because it's not so crowded, like a department store...

...For while the notion of rivalry implies some sort of blow by blow exchange, Russia and the United States have gone about presenting themselves in two entirely different fashions...

...The answer depends on the point of view of the visitor...

...Their entire pavilion is directed toward promoting these ideas, and while the actual physical content of the building may be enormous, the economy of basic ideas allows a constant theme to be sounded over and over: Soviet Communism did all this, and will do more in the future...

...Above all, however, the main negative reaction I heard, again and again, was, "I just don't get the point...

...they demand too much attention, too much "figuring out...

...In trying to avoid any touch of propaganda or pressure, the extreme of no direction at all has been adopted...

...The floors are filled with turbo-drills, machine tools, models of non-military airplanes, of the Moscow and) Leningrad subway stations, Moscow University, a "ten billion electron volt proton synchrophasotron"—the only one in the world—and a counter, longer than 100 feet, filled with nothing but postage stamps...

...For those who do, the display may well be disarming...

...The "democratic ideal"—nowhere mentioned in so many words—is hinted at by a collection of election buttons, a 480-page issue of the Sunday New York Times spread out on plywood boards, and a battery of voting machines with sample questions such as "In view of the world-wide emphasis on scientific research, do you feel that the position of the artist in our society has been made inferior...

...and in the third are illustrations of the "ideal tomorrow," with the chief photo a group of Negro and white school children together...

...Thus "the tractor factory" and "the drum," with two different jobs to perform, must be rated about equally successful in getting across their messages...

...So far, the chief fans of this portion of the exposition have been European sophisticates...

...To most visitors, the circular American structure, with its random offerings, is at first an object of confusion...

...The most subtle, and among the most publicized, of all the displays are the satirical series of murals by Steinberg, which include shirt-sleeved tourists, highways bordered by Rube Goldberg buildings, and dungaree-clad kids reading comic books...

...Contrast m BRUSSELS by SIGMUND BECK Forty-five sovereign nations, hundreds of organizations and commercial firms, an art exposition, a water show, 2,400 square yards of gardens, five theaters, and a lot more have been combined in 500 acres to produce what is known as "Expo '58," the first international exposition held in 20 years and possibly the last...

...Soviet fine art itself is a blatant tool of the state propaganda machine...

...Considering the general ignorance about the United States among Europeans, the fact that there are 44 other pavilions, and that people are somewhat bewildered by the great mass of material thrown at them, this seems a dangerous assumption...

...They are determined to convince all comers of something that by now hardly needs underlining— that the Soviet Union is a first-rate industrial power...

...Staffs of the two buildings try to play down the notion of rivalry, as though Belgium were some world so far removed as to destroy memories of the cold war...

...The Soviet restaurant, offering such authentic Russian dishes as caviar and sturgeon in champagne sauce, is a rather elegant place, with slow, impeccable service, and an atmosphere far removed from that of the collection of tools and statistics in the pavilion proper...

...Heysel Park, five miles north of Brussels, is the site of the enterprise, and the Belgian sponsors boast that they have accumulated a museum of modern man...

...The literature section outdoes most book stores...

...Intellectuals will probably find it hard to derive satisfaction from either display...

...The Russians are at Brussels to boast frankly of their material strength, to show the world their physical achievements of the past 40 years...

...the American pavilion is more similar to a full page advertisement in some slick weekly, showing a picture of the product and a little girl, or maybe a movie star, smiling...

...Along with the public self-kidding of the Steinberg walls, the most controversial of the pavilion's exhibits is that prepared by Fortune magazine, called "The Unfinished Work...

...it is also the one most packed with articles of every possible variety...

...Producers of the affair are hard pressed to understand the attraction of icy European models in American clothes, but if the object of the pavilion is to promote good feeling—and not necessarily understanding—toward the United States, the fashion show appears to be doing its part quite successfully...

...Although the exposition is made up of many parts, main interest focuses on the section housing the various national exhibits, ranging from those erected by Russia and the United States to the offerings of Liechtenstein (population 13,757) and San Marino (population 12,100...

...Their building itself is a no-nonsense rectangular affair of aluminum, steel, and glass constructed along the lines of a modern, but uninspired, industrial building...

...The key to the entire Soviet technique is found in an inscription in the fine arts section: "We create for the millions...

...The motto of the fair is "Progress in the Service of the Human Being," but a visitor is soon convinced that the participating nations are less interested in talking about human progress than in vaunting their own national virtues...

...although perhaps banal, nothing could be more appropriate...

...True to form, they carry no comment other than the signature of the artist...

...bined efforts of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia...

...but for the ill-informed, "Unfinished Business" will perhaps be just another addition to the confusion engendered by the pavilion...

...Despite the high-brow approbation for the more sophisticated aspects of our pavilion, the real successes are two down-to-earth presentations: Walt Disney's Circarama and a continuous fashion show...

...Wonderful, the American song...

...The American displays are a series of highlights, like illustrations in a book which have significance only to the reader...

...Not an inch of space has been allowed to go to waste...

...Even the restaurant—operated by New York's Brass Rail—is a thoroughly unpretentious establishment, consisting of a typical stool and counter arrangement with a few tables and chairs scattered around the remaining floor space...

...The hasty visitor is disappointed...

...The eagerly crude Russians are ruled out from the beginning...

...If the United States and the Soviet Union are in competition at Brussels, which is better...

...The comment of European cynics is that the best way to disarm critics is by self-criticism, which is certainly quite true...