Shaw v. Academy

Any man whose pen jabs as recklessly as George Bernard Shaw's must expect reprisals. One came to him last week. The Royal Academy showed him the door in effigy. They refused to hang his portrait by John Collier.

It was a heavily pointed shaft, for Artist Collier has been an honored exhibitor in the Academy for a full half-century. His work is thoroughly respectable. His portrait of Aldous Huxley, offered at the same time, was accepted. Obviously something was the matter.

"Words fail me," said Mr. Collier. "I consider the rejected picture the better of the two. Mr. Shaw himself is particularly pleased with it, and I think he intends to present it to the Dublin National Academy. If I may say so, it is well up to the standard of good portraits and the subject is a very interesting and distinguished man."

Sage Mr. Shaw announced: "The news is as surprising to me as to anyone else. All I can say is that there is nothing wrong with the portrait, nothing wrong with Mr. Collier and nothing wrong with me. The Royal Academy is the only other party concerned and it is for it to explain, if there is anything to be explained.

"As Mr. Collier's portrait of Aldous Huxley will be accepted, there can be no question of discrimination against the painter. The discrimination must be against the sitter, but, if the Royal Academy thinks that the public is heartily tired of portraits of me and eagerly curious to see what Mr. Huxley is like, then I agree with the Royal Academy and am delighted to yield to my young and much less shopsoiled literary colleague."

In Moscow

While honest Muscovites made merry over Easter, cunning felons stole to the glass roof of the State Museum of Fine Arts in Soviet

Moscow. Cutting through a skylight, they threaded the gilded corridors within, selecting loot. No ignorant art thieves, they passed by the florid canvases of 17th Century Frenchmen, of minor Dutchmen, Germans, inept Russians. But in front of a "Holy Family" by Correggio, they halted. Yes, that would do nicely. Out came a whetted blade and--whirr-rr-ripp--the fragile canvas sagged down from its frame. Titian's magnificent "Ecce Homo," oft-copied painting of Christ crowned with thorns,* they sliced out similarly. Also "St. John the Divine" by Carlo Dolci and Giunta Pisano's "Flagel-lation." Hurrying away, one of the robbers could not resist running his knife in a crude circle around the face of a "Christus" by Rembrandt and lifting out the patch. When Soviet officials reported the thefts to the press last week they evaluated the five stolen and mutilated canvases at $500,000.

Kent Exhibit

Rockwell Kent paints only his adventures. Wherever he sails he is on the watch for rugged seascapes. He does no portrait work on order. Nor does he paint for a living. He lives first and paints afterward. His last trip was to Ireland. Consequently his recent exhibition at the Wildenstein galleries, Manhattan, was a collection of Irish crags, cliffs, inscrutable waves, symbolical shadows, all stark, bleak, sternly ecstatic. Some critics deplore Artist Kent's dearth of variety--"his gaunt monotonous forms are always inflexibly the same." All critics admire his virile compositions, his color effects. In his art they perceive that however repetitious his works, they are all like the man himself, boldly individualistic. Since he has no patience with the life or art that shelters itself from wind and storm, he finds queer things happen to him. He was born at Tarrytown Heights, N. Y., his one conventional experience. From Horace Mann School, he testifies, he was dismissed as a hopeless moron. At Columbia University they found him a "capital" student, but finding the University after three and a half years a little irksome he blithely whistled good-bye to his diploma and the final semester, to become a painter. From his studies he was lured successively by Vermont, Alaska, the Straits of Magellan, Labrador, the Alps, Tierra del Fuego, Newfoundland. In one place he was arrested for assaulting a swindler. In Newfoundland, the good fisherfolk, seeing him staring out to sea in all kinds of bad weather, concluded he was a German spy signaling to submarines. "Oh, lots of things have happened to me. It's great stuff. I'll have to do something with it some day," laughs Artist Kent while Mrs. Kent notes with apprehension a funny light in his eye. "But you have finally settled down here in Greenwich Village, have you not?" He replies: "In the family it is generally hoped so. But really I have no permanent address."

*And Pilate saith unto them, 'Behold the man!'--ST. JOHN, 19:5. Judge Pilate found Jesus guiltless, scourged him and delivered him to the Jewish rabble. Soldiers platted thorns, crowned Jesus "King of the Jews." Jewish priests cried: "Crucify! Crucify!"