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The Brooklyn Museum, about half an hour from Manhattan by subway, was showing 200-odd "Masterpieces of African Art." Drawn from collections as far away as Basel, the exhibition was among the most comprehensive ever displayed. It was a delight of the sort that may result in later nightmares, however. Africa's master carvers were "masters" not in the Western but in a witch-doctor sense. Their purpose, mainly, was to carve objects for spirits to inhabit. Such artists never described, never analyzed, but only evoked. The spirits which African superstition demanded and African art evoked may be lonely as well as incomprehensible in Brooklyn, but they still weave powerful spells. It takes a dedicated collector to murmur, as one of the Brooklyn show's donors did last week: "These carvings are my friends." Brooklyn's Maternity Figure from the Congo can make a bronze by Henry Moore look limp—and comparatively friendly.
Every week in midseason, New York sees some 40 new art exhibitions. As the eight works shown on these pages demonstrate, they are likely to represent diametrically opposed views of life and also of art itself. Amidst such diversity, new and broader concepts of art may well form, and when that happens Manhattan will become an art center as creative as it is already avid.