You Too Can Paint

He owned a million-dollar-a-year business, but he was 65, and knew that he was too sick to run it any longer. So Brooklynite Morris Hirshfield gave up the E. Z. Walk Mfg. Co. (boudoir slippers), as he had once given up his cloak & suit business. He was free to paint at last.

No one had ever taught him how to paint, but in the remaining nine years of his ailing life Morris Hirshfield turned out 72 painfully detailed paintings, mostly sexless nudes and gaudy peacocks and quail. Before he died last summer, he had been given two one-man shows. Last week, posthumously, he had a third. It gave Amateur Hirshfield the distinction, rare among painters, of having exhibited every picture he had ever painted.

Critics had called his first show the Museum of Modern Art's "worst blunder," a "combination of preciosity and of the hunting down of butterflies with the aid of caterpillar tractors." His simple compositions seemed frozen into place by the fussy discipline of an old man. But to a public weary of modern art's chaotic ugliness, Hirshfield's childlike craft and gay colors were refreshing. Picasso said, just like that: "He's a great artist."

Hirshfield also had a high regard for his own work. He painted ten hours a day, every day. His work was as doggedly patterned as herringbone cloth. He never used a model for his nudes, explaining that at his age he "couldn't very well bring a nude woman in and paint her. It wouldn't look right." Collector Sidney Janis, Hirshfield's discoverer, thinks that Stage Beauties with Angels (see cut) grew out of a burlesque-show memory. Hirshfield was always having model trouble. For his Lion painting he tried the zoo, pictures at the public library, stuffed specimens at the American Museum of Natural History. He wound up with a cheap, toyshop lithograph, painted a lion with a tailored mane and a bland, human face that could do for a self-portrait of Hirshfield.

Many of his paintings were unrecognizable versions of picture postcards of photographs. For his last picture he used a postcard from Paris illustrating massive Sacre Coeur church. The result was Parliamentary Buildings (see cut), a childishly formal castle-in-air.

The night before he died of a heart attack, Primitive Hirshfield was full of high hopes for his next picture, an Adam and Eve. Said he: "It is going to be so outstanding that I don't need any animals in it."

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