Eilshemius, the UNIQUE

He called himself the "world's master artist." He wrote that he was the "Most Original--Most Prolific--Most Versatile," tbat he was, in fact, "UNIQUE." In one respect, Louis M. Eilshemius was. Though many artists have had their periods of vogue and obscurity, the ups and downs of Eilshemius have been the steepest.

He was ignored during most of his lifetime, then lionized, and then ignored again. Since his death at 77 in a psychopathic ward in Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital, interest in him has several times waxed and waned. Last week Manhattan's Balin-Traube Gallery, displaying 36 of his works, posed the question again: What is Eilshemius' place in American art?

Outlandish Revels. The drawing of a child's head that he did at 14, as well as a watercolor from his late teens, prove that he was a meticulous craftsman who could, if he had wanted, have bent to any fashion. But he wanted, as he said in a short story that he wrote about an artist who was obviously himself, to "revel in outlandish subjects." He could sometimes give a moonlit sky the same haunted-universe feeling as his contemporary, Albert Ryder. He could paint a game of croquet or a scene in Central Park with such feathery charm that these common, everyday scenes hardly seemed to come from reality. He painted innumerable nudes in all sorts of settings, and they all look as if he had made up the anatomy as he went along; sometimes they swirl about like leaves in the wind. Beach scenes, forests, Biblical stories, murders and imaginary wars poured from Eilshemius' brush --some repugnant, some enormously appealing, like the man himself.

Until he was 53, his work was rejected almost continuously by every U.S. show place, from the annual exhibitions of the National Academy to the famous Armory Show of 1913. Then, in 1917, he was accepted by an exhibition of independents, and French Painter Marcel Duchamp, the sensation of the Armory, declared an Eilshemius nude the finest painting of the 2,000 in the show. Artists such as Painter Joseph Stella and Sculptor Gaston Lachaise took up the Eilshemius banner.

Soon the dealers of 57th Street began to besiege him. But Eilshemius, who had inherited a bit of money, had no sense of business. He let his canvases go for pennies to dealers who cleaned up. As his money dwindled, he began painting on bits of newspaper, wood from cigar boxes, even the manuscripts of the strange piano pieces he composed. Finally, in 1921, a full 20 years before his death, he simply gave up painting entirely.

Womanologist & Mesmerist. His later life, as Biographer William Schack describes it, was a pathetic and half-demented tirade against the way the world had treated him. He was, after all, an "artist, author, composer, dramatist, globetrotter, improvisatore, womanologist, librettist, inventor, mesmerist." He had been, he told the world, the champion of everything, from shooting to pole vaulting; he was one of the world's great lovers, though "a genius gets tired of a girl in two months." As for other painters, he had no use for "this Picasso-basso fellow," or for "Bellini-meaney," or for Michelangelo ("nyeh, nyeh, nyeh").

When he was 68, he was hit by a car; and until he was sent to Bellevue he remained confined to one room in the moldering Manhattan mansion that he shared with a hated brother named Henry. "No one has seemed to care about me and my works," he said; but he was wrong. He has a fiercely loyal following that still includes Collectors Roy R. Neuberger and Joseph Hirshhorn, Sculptor Louise Nevelson and Dealer Sidney Janis. He is the unforgettable forgotten man of American art--a ranting, raving, bedraggled, bearded old eccentric, who proved in scores and scores of paintings that there was not only magic in his brand of madness but often greatness too.

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