Word: kootz
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This week shrewd Manhattan Art Dealer Sam Kootz opened a group show devoted to the weird shapes modern painters had made of women. His prize exhibit was a painting by the high priest of painful distortion, Pablo Picasso. Picasso's recent "Woman in Green"-a pink snout snoring over a swamp of green swirls-had successfully enraged London last year and was now appearing for the first time in the U.S. Georges Braque's supporting contribution was a painted plaster bas-relief of woman as lo, a harried heifer...
After that, Kootz's own local stable of U.S. painters could only irritate, not shock. Fernand Leger brought up the rear with one of his obsessive puzzles: three ropey girls tied in a Gordian knot. Venus de Milo was obviously as out of fashion as a pretty knee...
...coup of the season on Manhattan's arty 57th Street was the first postwar show of new Picassos (TIME, Feb. 10). A small art dealer, Sam Kootz, had pulled it off. How had he done it? Crowed Kootz: he had softened up the hard-to-get master by showing him photographs of paintings by six young U.S. abstractionists in Kootz's stable...
...turnabout, Kootz proudly arranged to show his U.S. abstractionists in Paris' swank Maeght gallery. This week the Paris show closed in a hurt hush. The critics had not been kind. Said the influential Arts: "Is this exhibition ... to show us that abstract painting is no longer a secret in the U.S.? This art form cannot surprise or shock us, for we are familiar with it, but it must have quality, which is certainly lacking. . . ." Added Les Lettres Françaises: "One could imagine that these painters had not even studied the original canvases but had contented themselves with examining...
From a flying trip to Paris, Kootz had brought back nine oils. Priced at $3,500 to $20,000, seven were sold in the show's first week. The New York Times's good, grey art critic, Edward Alden Jewell, dazedly noted the waving checkbooks and concluded that Picasso was "the supreme hero of the hour. I don't know about the bobby-soxers, but were Picasso suddenly, himself, to appear in New York, he would be pursued with all the ardor to which Frank Sinatra has long been accustomed...