Twelve of the forty-eight best American pictures of the year are now on view in Robinson Hall. The pictures are being exhibited through the first display at Harvard sponsored by the Living American Art Inc. This group has been organized to provide a new method of distributing pictures, so that most people in the country may have the opportunity of seeing the best representative paintings by living American artists.

"High Yaller"

The most striking picture in the current showing is that of Reginald Marsh, "High Yaller". This depicts a tall negro beauty striding down a Harlem street clad in her best Sunday finery. A dress of extraordinarily bright yellow contrasts strikingly with the grimness of the brownstone steps before which she passes and with the dusky hue of her skin. The modeling of the statesque figure is most carefully and wonderfully done, thereby achieving a most vivid sense of motion and a swinging gait.

Another work of great interest is the "Flower Vendor" by Raphael Soyer. It gives a scene of typical New York types, with emphasis on facial expressions and characteristic gestures and dress. Every face is carefully modeled, much attention being paid to individual features. An arresting point in the painting is the incongruity of the shabbily dressed man holding clumsily the luxurious and fragile flowers, whose bright red contrast strongly with the dingy black and brown of his dress. This red and the red of the handkerchief in his pocket put life into the scene and bring the whole into focus.

Satires

Of an entirely different type is the work "Central Park" by George Grosz. A true modernist he likes broad splashes of bright colors and brings out his ideas from impressions created by these. An other differing type also are the bitter satires of "The Senate" by William Gropper and of "Landscape Near Chicago" by Aaron Bohrod. Both of these works bring out the grotesque and the absurd in American life.