Escape

The modern turn to painting has set some 300,000 U.S. citizens to learning the pure and harmless pleasures of the brush and easel. Last week 228 of them were discovering the prouder joys of exhibition. The winners of a nationwide contest sponsored by Art News magazine, they had had their works hung in Manhattan's Riverside Museum for all the world to gawk and snicker at.

Except for Idaho and South Dakota, every state in the Union had been represented in the contest. More than a quarter of the entrants were housewives; the rest ranged from surgeons to engravers and from butlers to prison guards. One of them, an actor, reported that he had taken up painting simply "to see how it's done." That would be a good reason for art critics to paint; unfortunately, no critics had entered the contest.

Have Fun. Freedom and foolishness, idyls and idiocies, energy and ugliness pursued each other around the museum walls. By professional standards the show was 10% fine and 90% frightful. Sunday painters are becoming almost as common as Sunday drivers, and they can be equally incompetent. But even the worst pictures had obviously been fun to paint, and that made them fun to look at.

Many of the winning amateurs were old hands. A taxi driver recalled that as a child he had drawn pictures of ballplayers instead of playing ball. A more recent convert had been persuaded to try after reading Irving Stone's story of Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life, 'and W. Somerset Maugham's version of the life of Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence. Another novice confessed that his wife had given him a paintbox to keep him home nights. Most contestants had a contrary reason for painting: escape.

Carnival, an escape into childhood by a Chicago advertising man named Georg Bromberg, was pretty and gay as striped candy. Charles S. Smith's Urban Landscape was contrastingly gloomy, but its gloom was of the pleasantly unreal sort that makes Poe's horror stories entertaining. As might have been expected, there was an atomic-bomb picture--an explosion in a surrealist stew cooked up by Mrs. Annabel Berry of Dallas. The fanciest fantasy in the show was a Captive Amazonian Albino, painted by M. Lewis Croissant, a Missouri engineer.

Few of the artists on exhibition had dared to enter the fun house of abstract art or to ride the roller coaster of expressionism. The mirrored walls and revolving floors of abstraction were clearly better suited to professionals who like doing things the hard way, and the violent expression of emotions would never do for people who painted to relax.

Study Nature. The best pictures in the show were by those who had escaped to nature. Maurice H. Bisharat, a Connecticut doctor, had descended into his cellar to paint dead leaves in a vase, and won a gold medal for capturing the musty golden light in his hideout. A New Hampshire housewife named Eugenie C. Cooney had won another medal with her painstaking portrait of a lonely pine overlooking the sea. Dr. Harry Smallen had studied the surf at Martha's Vineyard, Mass, and successfully avoided the soapy-water look that makes most amateur seascapes dreary as dishpans. An old New England mill seen through a stand of bare trees, by Connecticut's Samuel Meulendyke, was as gracefully rendered as it was unpretentious. With loving care, New York's Mrs. Natalie B. Baker had painted a couple of trees, My Lilacs, in her own yard.

Such standout pictures seemed to show that painting is not too difficult, unless you work at it.

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