2 W ITH the family established as a happy, if slightly camera-shy unit, All Men and All Women can go to work. It's positively exhausting to see the orgy of planting, reaping, chopping, digging, sewing, bomb-making, fishing, building up, tearing down, cooking, weeding, sheepherding, mining, welding, scrubbing, and small parts assembling that takes place on the museum walls. All Men manages to stop for a drink of water and All Women sits momentarily on the sidewalk to rummage through a trash box. This picture, by Dorothea Lange, is one of the few really comic pieces in the collection. In general, though, nobody loafs on the job.
Nobody makes rugs or fine cabinetwork, or carves ladles out of whalebone.
The exhibit takes no account anywhere of those occupations that border on the arts. Things quiet down with schooling, a field where there seem to be neither recalcitrant pupils nor querulous parents, but Nat Farbman's picture of a Bechuanaland bard and his laughing audience is lively, great fun and, like all Farbman's work, beautiful to look at. The exhibition now spirals into a large room where it is impossible to decide on the order in which things are to be viewed. Music gets short shrift, and the determination to cover the globe seems to have lapsed. Singing is represented as a pastoral, amateur diversion.