Despite the I-won’t-wear-it manifestoes still echoing all over the U.S., Paris and most Manhattan fashion designers went confidently about their devilish work (see BUSINESS). Like it or not, the women would have pinched waists and puffed hips, predicted the couturiers. And why not? Look what the women put up with from the painters.
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.
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