Young Man in Manhattan

. . . where "artists" upon "artists" multiply,

Press-agents give nurse, critics admire,

And day by day more adjectives expire . . .

For some years the correct attitude among newspaper reviewers has been that the more artists, especially young and "promising" artists, get their stuff shown in Manhattan, the more indubitably the Renaissance is at hand. A few weeks ago. however, the New York Times's Howard Devree let himself go and wrote a couple of thousand words to the effect that if he and his colleagues were to be anything but leg men there must be a reduction in the prodigious number of seasonal exhibitions.

In one week a book reviewer commonly reads and meditates five or six books, but an art reviewer often has to view and comment on as many as 40 shows. His hurried kindnesses (Mr. Devree's in particular) are notorious. Since no artist who is worth his salt gives a damn whether he gets a nice "press" or not, this absence of criticism chiefly benefits the art business.

To thoughtful citizens Mr. Devree's alternative remedy seemed more sensible: unworried self-limitation and severity on the part of reviewers. Last week there were about 80 exhibitions of painting, sculpture and graphic arts in Manhattan, of which just one newcomer demanded serious discrimination. This was a collection of drawings and paintings by a 27-year-old Milwaukee painter named Paul Lewis Clemens, announced with some fanfare as a "discovery" of University of Wisconsin's resident-artist, John Steuart Curry.

A pink-faced, tall youngster with a copper-colored moustache, wavy pompadour, studious spectacles and knowing eyes, Clemens got his B.A. at Madison in 1932, studied at Chicago's Art Institute, married a pretty girl and returned to Milwaukee to work on the Federal Art Project. To Manhattan, along with his paintings, he sent a written declaration of his love for the great painters, for oil painting and for the female body. More noteworthy than this credo was his challenge to the school in which Discoverer Curry was discovered eight years ago: "I am glad to see that . . . the emphasis on the 'American scene' has diminished. It seemed to me preposterous and presumptuous for an artist to cultivate provincialism deliberately. . . ."

This was ingratiating, but the Clemens pictures provided critics with a great chance for healthy severity. Good in Clemens' work is his drawing. He can draw like nobody's business. Good, but still self-conscious is his handling of paint. But his sense of placement on the canvas is rudimentary, his composition derivative, his imagination happiest in such lusty caricatures as Casey at the Bat. Adding to the bruit of Clemens' "discov ery" was the inclusion in the Carnegie International last fortnight of his largest group painting, Water Music, which is an inept substitute for a snapshot.

Manhattan's reviewers were reserved but showed something less than the new severity proposed by Mr. Devree. The New York Post's Jerome Klein, resigned and brief, thought Clemens had "just the right ticket for success," but "his art leads definitely to the boudoir." The Sun's Henry McBride, greatly taken by the evidences that Clemens is a "thinking artist," restricted himself to "little warnings" about color and composition. Howard Devree himself let not even little warnings qualify his praise.

Cook-Coos on Exhibit

Ambition is valid in art but pretension is fatal. Bothered by neither are most comic artists, good and bad, who contribute to the homely grandeur of the daily U. S. Press. One of the best and best liked of them all is Ted Cook, writer and illustrator of a column, "Cook-Coos," in the Los Angeles Examiner and other newspapers. Last fortnight Los Angeles' Chouinard Gallery, "in the interest of a broader recognition of creative effort," opened an exhibition of 100 of the drawings Columnist Cook has made in the past 14 years to give his cracks crazy emphasis.

Ted (Proctor Fyffe) Cook is a bristly, beaming little man and the most famous citizen of Laguna Beach, Calif. A newspaper man since 1914, he was managing editor of the raucous Los Angeles Record in the early 1920s, when the flesh pots of Hollywood and the real-estate boom of Golden California produced a scandal every other week. When Scripps executives decided that what the Record needed was a front-page humor column, Cook could find nobody to write it but himself. Cook's early fictional characters, Congressman Frisby, Moronia, Rev. Wiley and the Japanese Poet T. S. Nakano, still live in his column, Hearst-owned since 1924, and his "Famous Last Words" department is part of the nation's burlesque memory.* He draws his pictures "rather hysterically" in the last ten minutes before deadline "on paper from the five and ten cent store." Individual as a thumbprint and straight out of kindly fantasy, a drawing like "The Bagging of the Carp" shows him at his best, takes its place with the ragged-edge absurdities of the Great Doodler, James Thurber.

*E.g.: "When Greta Garbo asked me to take her out I just laughed at her."

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