Two University Exhibits

Both of Harvard's art museums are presenting handsome, well-organized showings of modern graphics. At the Busch Reisinger, a chronological survey of German graphic work from the late nineteenth century to about 1930, has been collated from those pictures that the late Louis Black '26 donated to the Museum.

This exhibition reveals Mr. Black's apt and shrewd judgement. If perhaps, he was too fond of the works of Kubin, a tasteful illustrator but hardly a significant artist, he did give the Busch Reisinger many fine prints by Kokoschka, Corinth, and others.

Self-Portrait: When I Was Sick, Louis Corinth's etching with drypoint, magically creates--through brisk, vibrant strokes--the chilling atmosphere of the sick room. Kokotte by Otto Dix, is characterized by evanescent technique and incisive vision, not unlike Corinth's basically realistic style.

Oscar Kokoschka rebels against the austerity of early Expresisonist geometricism. (This style, incidentally, is well illustrated in the exhibit by Heckel's Couple and August Macke's strident Three Female Nudes.) Kokoschka's glowing, passionate lithographs, based on religious themes, have a piety to them that the harsher variants of Expressionism could not possibly allow. The culminating work of this fine show is the superb portrait of the famed German director Max Reinhardt; it glows with the tempestuousness and conviction of genius.

The Fogg shows 32 pencil drawings by the most delicate and, perhaps, most sensitive of the modern Italian artists, Amedeo Modigliani. This, too, is a fine exhibit, and the Museum is to be especially congratulated for the show's handsome appearance. In one corner, the Fogg devotedly displays the death mask of the artist, wreathed by laurel leaves, and, in another, placed potted ivies. This tasteful presentation complements the subdued, distinctiveness of the works exhibited. It is also a tribute to the knowing connoisseurship of Stefa and Leon Brillouin who have over the years built up this valuable collection.

The earliest effort of Modigliani, Reclining Female Nude, relates directly to his sculptural experimentation in primitive forms, but even here, lyricism, his greatest gift, predominates. From 1911 to 1915, Modigliani was profoundly influenced by Cubist distortion of the human form, and most of his drawings from this period are unsatisfying. In oil paint, the vigor of his rough and somewhat arbitrary compositions is easily expressed but soft and hard graphite pencil on a thin, flexible paper cannot imbue them with the necessary conviction. The scribbly, hectic quality of a piece like La Francaise indicates the extent to which the Cubist treatment of the human form was alien to Modigliani's romantic, and poetic temperament.

By about 1917, Modigliani's drawing reaches a consistently high standard of draftsmanship. With a few swift and caressing strokes, as in Lola, Modigliani can evoke a lovely girl, sitting at her ease, looking alertly at the viewer. Drawn in the last year of the artist's short, wantonly bohemian life, A Young Man is especially enjoyable for its intricately balanced composition and its artful, linear suggestion of facial volumes.

The stunning Portrait of a Woman, also done in 1919, depicts with vitality a woman of fashion. The finely tooled detail and Ingresque perceptiveness of Seated Lady contrasts with the vivid elegance of the Portrait. Here, Modigliani's relish for feminine beauty combines perfectly with his love for the controlled line to create a modern "master drawing."

Both museums at Harvard can be proud of these well-selected exhibits. There is nothing now being shown in Boston that can surpass them.