Painters

To start the New Year right, followers of U. S. painting last week tried to see two important shows in Manhattan:

P:At the Rehn Galleries, 24 new paintings by Ceramist-Architect-Painter Henry Yarnum Poor convinced critics that Mr. Poor at 49 had done well to leave his ovens cold and his drafting board dusty. Freer, more decisive, more vivid than any past productions of this able artist, the paintings affected other beholders like a bracing breeze. First Range of the Rockies, done in Colorado last summer, was a majestic landscape in greens and purples, given an effect of great distance by the sharp, tiny black shadows of cabins in a valley foreground. The Golden Tree, one of the largest, best-designed canvases, showed Mrs. Poor (Novelist Bessie Breuer) in a brown dress and bright green bandanna, engrossed in typescript at an open window ablaze with yellow autumn foliage.

P:At the Whitney Museum, a memorial show of the water colors of Charles Demuth surrounded a festive holiday crowd with the soft, rich colors and animated line of a master whom most critics rate second only to John Marin in his medium. Demuth died in October 1935, aged 52, after 20 years of quiet painting in the old Demuth home in Lancaster, Pa. The Demuth tobacco business in Lancaster, founded by a German forebear in 1770. is still carried on there by the family. Artist Demuth studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and for several years in Paris, was affected by Cezanne, the draftsmanship of Toulouse-Lautrec and later by the color experiments of the cubists. For his own pleasure, not for publication, he did a series of watercolor illustrations, notably six for Zola s Nana, four for Henry James's Turn of the Screw, which Critic Henry McBride of the New York Sun considered ''among the most memorable drawings to have been produced anywhere in this modern period." His experiments with cubist designs in architectural subjects have the neatness but none of the photographic quality of paintings by Charles Sheeler. Nobody has surpassed Demuth's serene water colors of flowers, painted in his Lancaster garden.

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