The Human Touch

The chief connection the East Side has with art is as a sprawling picturesque model to be painted and drawn and etched and lithographed again and again by Jewish artists who cannot, or will not, cut the umbilical cord. Even George Luks, who came from Pennsylvania and had not a drop of Jewish blood in his veins, found the East Side too rich and too picturesque to resist it and one of the prize pictures he turned out bears the title of East Houston street. Later in life, when he had the means, he had an East Side pushcart whose color combinations he liked carried up to the top floor of his East Twenty-second street studio and painted it there, with the pedlar standing by, in a double sense. At the First Municipal Art Exhibition, as I have twice before noted in this column, about the only piece of work that looked distinctively Jewish was an etching entitled Orchard street, by a man called McNulty. To move to another realm of art, the written word, Theodore Dreiser used at times to spend a Saturday night pawing among the neckties and the socks on East Side pushcarts, at least once under the guidance of Burton Rascoe. Pushcarts, at least for those who don’t have to make their livings from them, have an artistic justification above and beyond their economic and I am certain that when, and if, any serious movement is made to abandon the pushcart-system of making a living, artists will be found en masse on the side of the pedlars.

But I wasn’t planning to write about pushcarts, except to point out that pushcarts do not constitute the only contribution of the East Side to art. There is also the Educational Alliance and, more specifically, the art school of the Alliance under the head of Abbo Ostrowsky, painter and etcher, under whose direction the school was founded twenty years ago, in 1914. Mr. Ostrowsky seems too young a man today to have founded anything twenty years ago, but the fact remains that he did.

MODEST, MILD, EFFICIENT

By the time he had arrived in the United States, in 1908, he had already studied art at Odessa and between the date of his arrival and the founding of the art school at the Alliance, he studied at the National Academy here. He seems to be a modest, mild and efficient sort of person and, like most good artists, more fluent of expression with the tools of his art and craft than with the tongue or pen. There is much at the Educational Alliance to which he can point with pride, but he consistently refrains from doing so.

The Alliance art school, he tells me, was founded at the height of Jewish immigration into the United States. For many young immigrants who came to it, the art school helped to cushion the clash between the old background and the new environment, between the old spiritual and religious values and the new urgencies of getting along under fundamentally changed conditions. The school helped in the processes of adaptation; it replenished with new material the spiritual and intellectual vessel, so to speak, which the Talmud, for example, and Talmudic values had helped fill on the other side of the Atlantic. To be sure, not every young immigrant found his medium of expression in art; many found it in the labor movement, in trades, in universities, in professions, in general learning, but for those who sought emotional expression through art, there was the art school, a bulwark whose function, in Mr. Ostrowsky’s words, was, and is “to give equipment to those who may have something to contribute.”

ONE HUNDRED STUDENTS

At the present moment there are one hundred students in the art department of the Alliance, including the evening and Sunday students who have jobs and who may be classified as the recreational painters. There are classes in painting, sculpture, etching and in the applied arts. The teaching staff has been reduced to three, including Mr. Ostrowsky. The course for the full-time artists is five years, which limitation is of course not ironclad. You may stay longer, you may go sooner. Important painters have come out of the Alliance, but Mr. Ostrowsky insists that the student stands or falls by himself; that no good teacher can overcome the defects of a bad student, and no bad teacher can spoil a good student.

He insists that the longer a man teaches art the less ready is he to predict that this student will be a success and the other a failure. He values emotional power and sincerity and industry far more highly than glib craftsmanship. He intimated that he has been surprised too often by the unexpected in the fortunes of his students to venture again even to guess at what students will do with their futures or their futures with them.

Mr. Ostrowsky tells me that it was discovered, during the life of the art school, that in the course of the five-year training period, some of the more emotional students get off into day-dreaming and that, as a result, many of them found it difficult to adapt themselves to the exigencies of earning a living. To help these students, to make it possible for them to live by applied art, should they find it difficult to live by pure art alone-and what a pathetically small number of painters do manage to live by pure art alone-craft classes were started, only two years ago. These classes are chiefly for the full-time students.

THE DIVISION OF STUDY

The procedure is as follows: In the morning the students work in the craft classes and after lunch, which is provided out of the craft class funds, the students go to their painting, or drawing or sculpture, class. The surplus from the sale of the craft studio products is divided among the students. Mr. Ostrowsky showed me some lovely block-print linens, some of which are purchased by local department stores; screens, some of which are commissioned, a large tablecloth with designs made from Hebrew motifs, and similar objects. In the craft classes, the students learn about the application of art to industrial needs, such as advertising and magazine illustration.

Among the well-known American painters who have passed through the Alliance art school are Peter Blume, an almost magical colorist; Moses Soyer, Saul Berman and Ary Stillman, whose one-man show at the Midtown Galleries is eminently worth seeing, and Maurice Glickman, sculptor, who won a Guggenheim fellowship this year. Another student has been Isaac Soyer, younger brother of the Soyer twins.

HELD OVER TO THE FALL

“Trio,” in which Miss Fay Marbe was going to make her entrance into the legitimate theatre, has been put over until Fall. Difficulty in finding the right leading man for the play is the reason.