Gallery Notes

Abstract

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY and the Brooklyn Museum are holding exhibitions of drawings, etchings and lithographs by the late “Pop” Hart. The Downtown Gallery's showing of Hart's work has recently closed, although this gallery is showing an aquatint and four of his lithographs, including the splendid Mexican Orchestra, in the annual exhibition of the American Print Makers of which Hart was one of the organizers. No man who uses a humorous nickname in place of his real one to such an extent that he even uses it to sign his work, could be anything else but a man with endearing qualities for many friends, and a man without pretentious. This personal amiability and casualness creeps into all his work; it is in his generous, free lines, and in his unconventional use of wash and color to accent his forms. In his industrious travelling, in Spain, Morocco, Mexico, the West Indies, and in the Southern states, he watched human doings and he saw that they are as full of laziness and content and accidental humor, as they are full of drama and destiny, and he preferred them on their lighter side. It is this lighter side he never tired of setting on paper, and for this, as well as for his skill, we should be grateful to him.