Word: kootz
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Lines formed out to the sidewalk waiting to get in. The little fifth-floor gallery, which usually regarded 100 people a day as a crowd, was filled with so many hundreds every day that the building superintendent worried about undue strain on the floor. Silver-haired Art Dealer Sam Kootz was delighted; he had scooped Manhattan's arty 57th Street with the first one-man show of new Picassos since before...
...show, entitled "The Big Top," opened last week. Dealer Samuel M. Kootz borrowed Picasso's pinwheel-shaped Acrobat from Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art for the occasion, invited six young U.S. abstractionists (Calder, Motherwell, et al.) to paint circus pictures to go with Léger's. The catalogue cover hopefully urged gallerygoers to see clowns, tumblers, bareback riders, and other intrepid performers. Some of their jigsaw abstractions looked as if they had played with kaleidoscopes instead of seeing a circus. Léger's Acrobats with White Horse and slant-eyed, four-ringed Chinese...
Surrealists, Class-Strugglers. Kootz whales away at surrealism in general as "an aspect of frustration" and evidence of "the decay of France." He admires the earlier work of Giorgio di Chirico. But of Salvador Dali he says: ". . . Each new showing evidences an hysterical attempt to provide the spectator with a different shock than that of the preceding exhibit." Of a Max Ernst show in 1941 he remarks: "Here, just the right amount of peep-show pornography ... to provide final fashionable acceptance to an audience thrilled by its chichi eroticism...
...class struggle" painters (of whom William Gropper is best known), Kootz says: "Gropper, for instance, has never been able to invent a plastic language of his own. . . . The plain fact of the matter is that the radical pattern of this school is as dull esthetically as the reactionary pattern of the nationalist school. Both schools trade in local incidents, the class-struggle boys bellyaching that nothing is good enough, the nationalists insisting that it was good enough for Pop and it is good enough for them. . . . Slice it any way you want and it still comes out a literary tract...
Expressionists, Abstractionists. The work of Kootz's own modern favorites is derived from the "expressionists [who] use the psychology of color ... to express a moody, mystic Weltschmerz." He singles out Abraham Rattner, Walter Quirt, Paul Burlin. Of Rattner (see cut), he remarks...