Surprise!

For the traditionalist visitor, Manhattan's wide-windowed Museum of Modern Art has as many jolts as a Coney Island funhouse. Some summer tourists, thankful for the air-conditioning (installed primarily to protect the pictures), take it all in good part. Others are made to feel stupid, cross, or both, when confronted with such enigmatic works as Malevich's White on White--a white-painted canvas adorned with one tilted white square. They are dizzied by the linoleum-like pattern of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, dismayed by the necrophilic horror of Albright's Woman, and dumbfounded by Joan Miro's Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird--in which the "Person" is a leg with an eye in its kneecap, the "Stone" is an egg trailing a dotted line, and the "Bird" looks like an unworkable bow & arrow.

Pictures like White on White have more historic than intrinsic interest (painted 30 years ago, Malevich's solemn joke helped clear the way for later abstractionists). A few highbrow enthusiasts maintain that other paintings like the Miro and the Mondrian are really great art, and that the public will some day realize it. Be that as it may, the museum keeps buying whatever suits its own rarefied fancy, and exhibiting its finds with an air of "Close your mouth and open your eyes and I will give you a big surprise!" Last week it had on exhibition two recent purchases that seemed to be candidates for future, if not present, fame.

Both were by Parisian sculptors already represented in the museum collection. Constantin Brancusi's Bird in Space had long been a polished bronze bone of contention for museumgoers. To some it looked like a crackpot design for a propeller blade; others swore they got the same upward lift from it as from Shelley's To a Skylark. The museum's new Brancusi was a six-foot slab of blue-grey marble, precariously balanced on its side and entitled Fish. It had neither head nor tail, and no one could be sure in which direction the fish was meant to be swimming. But the slab, gently curved and polished to paperknife thinness, did seem to move somehow, and the uneven grain of the marble gave it a wavering, watery air. It was no small feat to make stone come alive. The Fish might be ivory-towerish, but no one could call it a joke.

Alberto Giacometti's surrealist construction, The Palace at 4:00 a.m., had tickled as many visitors as it puzzled. His new sculpture, City Square, was more serious and therefore harder to take. Giacometti had long since abandoned surrealism to carve tiny classical heads which he carried in his pocket, and progressed from them to stick-figures whose pocked and ragged flesh was stretched elastically upward to the snapping point (TIME, Feb. 2, 1948). City Square disposed five such figures, only a few inches high, on a broad bronze pedestal. All were walking determinedly, and their paths were bound to cross, but their thinness made each seem very much alone.

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