Salon de Printemps

There were rooms and rooms full of ladies with nothing on at all. Some of them lay on beds, gazing at you pensively. Some sat up, turned this way or that from the hips to exhibit their soft back curves, while others faced their beholders squarely erect, with something like defiance in their eyes and a metallic quality about their bold fronts expressive of womankind's underrated hardihood.

They are not an unusual sight at the annual spring salon in the Grand Palais, where all the artists of Paris carry their best work of the past year for public exhibition. Yet such was the number of undressed ladies that one exasperated critic went back to his newspaper and wrote, "It isn't a salon, but a bedroom."

American visitors thumbed through their catalogs for names of their countrymen, to see what they had been learning from the Continental masters. One of the first pieces they paused before was a bronze "Aphrodite" by Sculptor Rudolph Evans, the young man from the Corcoran Gallery in Washington whose "Golden Hour" won him a medal and fame at the salon of 1914 and now reposes, a radiant study of adolescent gravity, in a specially lighted domed room at the home of Banker Frank A. Vanderlip.

Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney's group to commemorate the landing of U. S. troops at St. Nazaire was there--an eagle with 35 feet of tensile wingspread alighting on French soil with a virile young idealist on his back. One marveled at the power this slight Mrs. Whitney can put forth.

There were a marble bust and a slim bather spun in clay by Barbara Herbert of Manhattan, first U. S. sculptress ever admitted to the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Rosa Bonheur's pupil, Anna Klumpke of California, showed a hot-colored flower study. Young George Hill, who preserves what he can of the solitude and fresh air of his native northern Michigan by living in one of the loftiest studios on the Boulevard de Montparnasse, received fresh compliments for his clear, restful "Tea on a Balcony."

The exasperated critic notwithstanding, there was really a great deal to see besides bedroom ladies, some 3,500 works in all--processions, cavalcades, crosses, St. Anthony in a dozen poses, cardinals, heroes, canals, churches, inscrutable dishes of fruit, chaotic spasms of pigment labeled "Mood," "Flight" and other rapt generalizations. . . . There was a sturdy young Russian landscapist who has been studying of late years at the Philadelphia Academy, Captain Vladimir Perfiliev, erstwhile of the Don Cossacks. He had painted the grim mountains of Montenegro and the bright Balkans beyond, and if you went with him to his studio he had some very clever portrait work to show you, both in color and in black-and-white. He would tell you, with a quaint mixture of genuine Slavic dignity and bursting childish delight, of how his work had taken on with patrons in Philadelphia, then Rochester, Cleveland, Chicago, Lancaster, Pa., and lately in Manhattan.

And the Three Chevaliers of the Latin Quarter were there--F. A. Bridgman, the 79-year-old Alabaman who paints in Algiers mostly and won his first salon medal in 1877; George Rowland of New York, aged 61, landscapist; and T. Alexander Harrison, 73, originally a Philadelphian but, like the other two, so long a resident of France that his hands have learned to talk, and the feeling of his landscapes takes you back to the best days of the Barbizon school. All three are members of the Legion d'Honneur; all three have contributed to the spring salon since the century turned, and longer. Painter Harrison this year hung four canvases-- "La Marne," "Solitudes," "Images," "Le Midi" (all to be pronounced as they were painted, Frenchwise, exquisitely).

The youngest exhibitor was Tony Ricou, 13, son of Director Georges Ricou of the Opera Comique. He paints on Sundays and Thursdays when there is no school, and the National Society of Fine Arts accepted one of the two pieces he submitted--a modest but careful exercise with fruit in a bowl on the Ricou dining-room table.