Art: Voice of America

In West Berlin, art lovers were getting their first postwar look at a show of representative U.S. art. Included in the exhibition: 130 paintings and prints of 97 artists, from a Gilbert Stuart George Washington to a nonobjective dribbling by Jackson Pollock.

Postwar German art is having a fling at surrealism, abstractionism and expressionism (TIME, March 26), but what the Berlin critics liked best about the American show was the modern realism. Wrote one critic: “The most interesting American artists to us Germans seem to be those whose convictions are most different from those of the School of Paris [Picasso, etc.]” Singled out for special cheers: Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth.

In four weeks, the exhibition had drawn a whopping 15,000 visitors. The Berliners’ interest was as much curiosity about the U.S. as about U.S. art. Said Der Tag: “The language of these canvases will help a good deal to make us understand America.”