Salute to the Guggenheim

This showing of sixty-five works from the Guggenheim Museum in New York has been presented to Bostonians not only to honor the Guggenheim on the opening of its new, Frank Lloyd Wright building, but also to remind local art-goers of the serious deficiency to modern art in Boston public collections. Perry T. Rathbone, Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, hopes that this exhibit will stimulate the formation of a permanent collection of modern art in his museum so that such loan exhibitions will no longer be needed to display representative works of the twentieth country to the Boston public.

The MFA does well to honor the recent Wright creation. It deserves such recognition. But to do so by borrowing from the Guggenheim when its best acquisitions have naturally been used for its grand opening was ill-advised. This show is for the most part composed, unfortunately, of minor works and it is hard to see how such a big, but unsatisfying display will convince Boston's millionaires that modern art is worth purchasing for local museums.

Unfortunately, the show has many distressing disappointments. Calder, the grand Yankee sculptor whose works have for so long been characterized by their steady high quality, exhibits three mobiles but only one of them displays any of Calder's usual skill. The other two move only under strong provocation (I had to fan them with my notebook close by before they deigned to revolve) and when they finally do go into orbit, the objects don't describe a flexible and communicative arc in space.

Modigliani's Portrait of a Student displays the loosest sort of lyricism into which the Modigliani manner can degenerate. Picasso's two little cubist paintings have little more than the master's signature to recommend them. Their color has no vitality or subtlety and the jumped compositions, especially that of the cramped Bottle and Glass, exemplifies Picasso's carelessness at its most annoying. Carelessness, indeed, sloppiness blemishes a Miro pastel, titled, for no readily apparent reason, Woman Doing Her Hair Before a Mirror. A mysterious and evocative oil painting of his, Composition, done in 1925, has a flow and easiness to it that the other work so painfully lacked.

Ten painting by Kandinsky, the Russian-born dean of the non-objectives school, provide an interesting guide to his development from a Fauvism that already tended towards abstraction to his eventual creation of abstract works in the most cerebral and calculating of styles. Kandinsky's early work, swirling with pure color and vivid with strong brushwork, strikes me as his most successful. When he paints flat colors enclosed in rigid outlines floating against a monochromatic background, them my dissatisfaction with the picture equals his lack of attachment to its content.

Yet, there are worth while things is this show, a few engaging works here and there which reveal new or accustomed brilliance in the styles of major moderns. A Mondrian Composition in his familiar pure style looks as neat and as pleasing as the calm pictures of his seventeenth-century fellow country man, De Hooch.

Leger's early work has a rugged texture, and gruff and brusque approach to subject matter that his smooth-surfaced later pictures lack. TheSmokers of 1911 and Variations of Form of 1913 show this style at its most robust and most assertive. Their power is unparalleled in the rest of the show.

The best of atypical Chagall is offered here. The three large canvases of his early maturity depict in a touching manner emotional situations of complexity. Though Chagall's technique some times seems a bit shaky, the pictures, Burning House, Birthday and The Soldier Drinks, all seem to derive from the artists's own experiences in Russia and Paris. Burning House, full of a peasant bulkiness, is especially gripping with its vivid coloring and engrossing catastrophe. Birthday, painted with glowing Iyricism, describes a some how convincing act of leviation, by which a husband floats over to kiss his wife.

Of the immediate contemporaries, the Italian sculptor, Giacometti, uses his electric virtuosity to enliven a canvas, one of his few. The subject appears ghost-like through the frantic scribblings of incised oil paint.

But the control of Mandrian and vigor of Leger, Giacometti and Chagall are the only significant assets of this sprawling show. For the most part, it gives one the impression that modern artists are sloppy and devoid of imagination. Though such is not the case at all, the till-now reticent benefactors of the Museum of Fine Arts presumably don't know this. Needless to say, the present exhibition is not going to enlighten them.