Nudist

Twelve years ago a sandy-haired German with vast feet and an enormous nose shuffled into the Manhattan gallery of Erhard Weyhe. He was, he said, a baker by trade. His name was Emil Ganso and he had a portfolio of drawings to show. Dealer Weyhe did not think the pictures were good enough for an immediate exhibition. Nevertheless he signed Baker Ganso to a long contract, gave him a small weekly allowance on which to live while he went on painting. It was a shrewd investment. Proudly last week Dealer Weyhe gave his protege an exhibition, and there was not a critic to deny that Baker Ganso is now an important U. S. painter.

Woefully lacking in class consciousness, Artist Ganso would rather paint a pair of buttocks than all the breadlines on the Bowery. For years his artistic idol and best friend was Jules Pascin. Artist Pascin specialized in painting naughty little girls in pale misty colors with a spidery delicate line.

Ganso's nudes are more frankly sensuous than those of Pascin, his color is stronger, his line less subtle. Jealous rivals have called him the "Rembrandt of barroom decorators."* As a matter of fact, no barroom yet boasts a Ganso nude, and Artist Ganso is quite as interested in painting the rolling hills, farms and orchards of Woodstock, N. Y., where he spends his summers, as he is in the lush ladies who pose for him in the winter time in Manhattan.

Best of the Ganso nudes exhibited last week was the figure of a young model seated by a tea table, a black lace scarf thrown over her shoulders (see cut). Shrewdly Artist Ganso has repeated the tawny color of her skin in the tan walls, the rich brown of the floor. Other pictures that stopped gallerygoers: two young women lying side by side on a lake shore, one nude, the other dressed only in silk stockings & pumps; and the back view of a plump female sprawled on a divan. A Guggenheim Fellowship and many exhibition prizes have come to Artist Ganso, but watchful Dealer Weyhe is careful not to overprice his work. Ganso's most seductive nudes sell for $150 to $500 apiece.

* In Paterson last week New Jersey's Alcohol Beverage Control Commissioner D. Frederick Burnett was asked to pass on the propriety of a barroom Venus that had outraged the sensibilities of a passing minister's wife. After personal inspection, Commissioner Burnett wrote to the complainant: "The painting is mediocre, the color flat, the style eclectic and the subject trite. I am not concerned, however, with artistry or the lack of it. ... There is no reason why places for the consumption of liquor should not be made comfortable and decorative. . . . Pictures, as well as flowers, may brighten a corner. "Obscene' should not be an execration lightly to be hurled at a painting because it does not conform to one's own viewpoint. . . . The picture is not obscene, therefore I shall not order its removal."

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