The Human Touch

THE No-Jury Exhibition of the Salons of America, Inc., now current in the Forum of the R. C. A. Building in Rockefeller Center, is so tremendous that the Salons and the Center should have borrowed Dexter Fellows, press agent for the circus, to ballyhoo it and describe it. It seems to me that any one else who can do justice to the show, who could manage to convey a graphic idea of its scope and range, variety and dimensions and inexhaustibility, would by that stroke of phraseology announce his fitness to succeed Mr. Fellows as circus press agent. No other reward seems more fitting. I hereby timidly suggest one slogan: American Art, All of It, Under One Roof, for Only Two Bits, (A slight exaggeration, but a slogan exaggerate).

I suggest also the installation of, at least, a lunch-bar, so that the gluttons for punishment–I mean for art–may have an opportunity to refresh themselves midway in their cultural peregrination, or, if that is impossible, that intermission tickets be given such gluttons who may want a bite and a smoke after a two hours’ journey through the thirty-three galleries and may still want to return. Of course we New Yorkers who care about art are spoiled, having so much art accessible at almost all times of the year, but I am pretty certain that if I were living in a Middle Western town, one, let us say, that had no museum, and if I were to come to New York some time before May 6, I would want to fill my eye to satiety at the Forum, even though I could wish that there were a thousand or so fewer bad pictures.

CHEATING ON THE MILE

We thought that Mayor LaGuardia was sponsoring a lot of art when he opened the First Municipal Art Exhibition with its 1,500 exhibits, and there is hardly an art-gazer who didn’t cheat on the last several hundred feet of that “Mile of Art.” But in this show, and within the same space, there are 4,567 listed works of art and about five hundred works in addition to these not accounted for in the catalogue: they came in too late. There are about 1,500 listed exhibitors and probably another 170 not accounted for in print. There are big men in the show, people who have been given and can get one-man exhibitions in the best galleries in New York, people whose pictures have been bought by the museums, and then there are a vast number of Sunday painters, part-time artists who make their living doing something else–lucky fellows!–and paint because they think they can, or just because they like it.

According to a rough estimate made with the help of Holger Cahill, who may be called the general director of the show, there are approximately 110 Jewish exhibitors. Some of the best American painters of Jewish race, such as Weber, Kroll, Karfiol, the Soyers, Walkowitz, Cikovsky, are not among them. Which is perhaps all right, since they have so many other opportunities. But among the Jews who are exhibiting are Florine Stettheimer (not in the catalogue), who did the sets for the Stein-Thomson opera, “Four Saints in 3 Acts”; William Zorach, one of the greatest of living sculptors; William Auerbach-Levy, the etcher; Ben Benn, Maurice Becker, Ahron Ben-Schmuel, Edward Biberman, whose work has been seen at our best galleries; Arnold Fried man, J. W. Golinkin, Hilarie Hiler, who has at least one rich canvas there; Paul R. Meltsner and Doris Rosenthal.

YOU’VE SEEN THEM BEFORE

Artists exhibiting at the Salons whose work has appeared in reproduction, at on time or another in the Jewish Daily Bulletin include: Arnold Friedman, Irwin D. Hoffman (who recently had a one-man show at the Empire Galleries), A. Z. Kruz, Ruth Light, Joseph Margulies (who recently had a one-man show at the Midtown Galleries), Paul R. Meltsner, Doris Rosenthal, who gave an exhibition recently at the Morton Galleries; Nat Schwarzburg and William Wolfson, an artist in lithography and wood-block whose work I much admire. In going over the catalogue in quest of Jews, I blithely checked everybody named Cohen, or Cohn, but I find on second glance that one of the Cohns has the first name of Mac-Arthur. Which makes it a little difficult. Another exhibitor, of whose Jewishness I am not at all dubious, is called James P. Warburg. Mr. Warburg has two exhibits at the show but hard as I tried to locate them, it was impossible, for the pictures are hung according to neither a numerical nor alphabetical system, and most of the pictures I did recognize I recognized either because of familiarity with the style of the painter, or because I had seen the same canvases in the studios of the artists who had painted them. One way of getting around galleries without having to buy catalogues is to learn to read signatures on canvas.

At the First Municipal Art Exhibition, there were quite a number of Jews, but I pointed out then that there was nothing Jewish about their work. They painted in no Jewish manner and their subjects were no more Jewish than the subjects of the Gentiles were Gentile. What seemed most Jewish in that exhibition, an etching of an Orchard street scene, was done by a man called McNulty.

HE PAINTS A POGROM

In the present exhibition there is only one picture that cries, most Jewishly “Gevalt!” It is entitled “A Pogrom” and the painter, Leo Birchansky, must have had a lot of fun doing it, even if, as a Jew, he may properly deny having enjoyed his task of imaginative description. It is an enormous canvas, an oblong, measuring, it seemed to me, yards by feet. There is not an unpainted square inch. It is simply jammed with Cossacks and Jews, the Cossacks with their swords drunk with blood and the Jews either prone, or with praying shawls, awaiting the end. That Russian street, or open space, or whatever it is, is more crowded than any subway train at the height of the rush hour. My authority on pogroms, who happened to be with me at the time, expressed that this painter never saw a pogrom, for Jews never at any time ran in a heap toward the organists in order to expedite their slaughter. They usually tried to run away. Wouldn’t you? Nevertheless, considered as folk art “A Pogrom” is a striking canvas, but a little too bloody for comfort. The only other typically Jewish work, and certainly more admirable as art, is A Z. Kruz’s portrait impression of an old clothes man.

Among the part-time artists whose work has received commendation is the sculptor-dentist, Dr. S. B. Kahan, whose six pieces of sculpture have been highly praised–and by other sculptors. Others among the exhibitors include a guard at Rockefeller Center, an iron worker, a salesman, a barge captain, an elevator operator and a couple of sailors following in the tradition of John Masefields’ Dauber–there is a Jewish bookseller by the name of Dauber who doesn’t daub and a post office clerk, Arnold Friedman, whom I had always supposed to be a full-time professional painter. There is also the Jewish wife of a Gentile poet, the same who filed suit against Jimmie Durante, and at least one school teacher.

I discovered only a few minute ago the reason for the extraordinarily large number of exhibits; it is the extraordinarily small fee demanded of exhibitors. For two dollars you may exhibit three works of art. That’s why so many painters lugged their works of art to Rockefeller Center in threes, sixes and nines. Thus leaving the staff responsible for the hanging at sixes and sevens, and also a little exhausted when the doors were first flung open.

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