Word: artfulness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week a letter appeared in the New York Post from Paul Manship, who is designing the most prominent sculpture at the Fair, recalling that "even Chicago counterbalanced its fan dancer with a world-famous art exhibit" (at the Art Institute, a mile away from the fair grounds), and boldly asking his clients: "Are exhibitions at the Fair to be limited to products that carry a price tag? ... Is this to be a World's Fair worthy of New York, or another glorified Coney Island...
...this first bean-spilling, gardenia-loving Grover Whalen replied that the Fair Corporation could not provide safe housing for a costly art exhibition unless it erected a permanent, fireproof building, unlike the temporary structures planned for the Fair. Instead of this, he said, arrangements were being made with the Metropolitan Museum (eight miles from the fair grounds) "and other like institutions" to hold exhibitions presumably like Chicago's. This message, which also appeared in the Post, was brought to the regular meeting between the artists' representatives and the Fair Board of Design. Mr. Manship's fellow artists...
Soon a second, more elaborate announcement from Grover Aloysius Whalen reached Manhattan city desks. Remembering what he had not remembered before, Mr. Whalen called attention to "a major art project for the New York World's Fair of 1939" involving a Community Arts Centre, where workers in the arts will display the processes of painting, sculpture and printing. "Through these 'arts in production'," said Mr. Whalen, "we hope to bring home to the average man that a work of art is not something conceived on Olympus but is produced by people very much like himself...
Paris' exhibition of L'Art Cruel (TIME, Jan. 24) had not long closed its doors on a willing world before there opened last fortnight in a small, select Galerie Beaux-Arts an exhibition with a broader appeal. This was the first international show of Surrealism (superrealism) ever held in the city where that movement was born.* Critics who have been forgetting about this weird school's pristine vigors were reminded of them forcibly when the opening night turned into a near riot, with 2,000 chittering Frenchmen milling around the gates and a troop of police...
Seen thus by dim and bobbling light were 229 objets d'art by 60 artists of 14 different nations, many of them expressive of war and spiritual suffering, many more bearing out the abstruse eroticism of the entrance hall. To Surrealists sex and horror are indescribable and somewhat confused; therefore they merely express themselves on these matters through a calculated but capricious symbolism. At least one exhibit was animated (see cut). One of the objects displayed was a suitcase containing a neatly packed skull and gas mask stuffed with newspapers headlined The Menace of Fascism. Another was an enameled...