Art and Artists

Some twenty-five years ago a fifteen-year-old Jewish lad, native of Atic, a small desolate Bessarabian village, sat at one of New York’s many docks, his feet dangling over the water, and overwhelmed by the color, the smoking factories and the coming steel structures, took out a crumpled sheet of paper and soon lost himself in a fervent attempt to reproduce the scene before him.

Aaron Goodleman decided to become an artist and his troubles began.

Errand boy, factory hand, dock laborer, studying drawing and modelling at night in a dingy room of an East Side tenement house. His was the usual uphill climb of many Aarons the wide world over.

The Aaron J. Goodleman exhibition of sculpture at the Eighth St. Gallery, 61 W. 8th St., is the final result of the long-drawn-out struggle for existence and art.

I have been acquainted with Goodleman’s earlier work, having come across it occasionally at exhibitions and at the homes of friend and I must confess I was not particularly impressed by it, for it wa### I thought, too conventional in character, too narrowly nationalistic in theme and too crude in execution.

His heroes — usually Messiahs, bearded prophets, gaunt wandering Jews, were not interpretations but rather hackneyed illustrations. A well-realized piece of sculpture is so convincing that one feels it has always existed and that the sculptor has memerly released it from the wood or marble in which it was confined. Goodleman, I felt, too often does not seem to work in unison with his stone, tortures it, and fail to bring out the possibilities later in it.

It was therefore with many mi### givings that I went to his show, b### as I tarried among his sculpture these doubts seemed to disappear one by one, for the artist undoubtedly has grown. His sympathies have broadened and his nationalism has given way to a more varied and human view of things. He can be tender, almost caressing, as in the portrait of his son,—earthly as in his marble group, Mother and Child,—brutally realistic as in his Necklace (a Negro with a noose around his neck).

An interesting exhibition of fifty paintings by young American artists is in progress now at the Montross Galleries, 785 Fifth Ave. Many of the paintings shown are full of meri### and promise. Especially worth mentioning are Nat. Schwarzburg’s Dancer, Paul Mommer’s dramatic Landscape with Rock and Selma Freeman’s Hooverville.