" Men Are Square "

Four hundred years ago court painters were accomplished diplomats. Today, at the court of capital, the artist sits on industrial relations advisory boards. Gerrit A. Beneker is the first and perhaps the most able practitioner of the new profession of Industrial Art. He tells how it happened in a paper on Art and the Industrial Problem in Scribner's Magazine for September. Many will remember his virile War and Liberty Loan posters: Sure, We'll Finish the Job and Work As You Would Fight. In his youth Beneker visited Homestead and other towns where steel has left its stamp, and vowed: " Some day I'll have a studio in a steel mill." On February 1, 1919, he entered the employ of the Hydraulic Steel Co. of Cleveland, at the invitation of Whiting Williams and other far-seeing executives. The best poster artists of the nation lent their genius to the enlistment of recruits, the selling of bonds, the conservation of food, during the War. Today Beneker is doing the same job in a peacetime environment--promoting the morale of labor and fostering understanding between employer and employee. How "Peggy" Hirsh and other hard-boiled Hungarian, Polish and Italian laborers--first indifferent or hostile, then fascinated by the man who could paint in the sputter and glare of the open hearth and Bessemer converters--fight for the chance to have their faces immortalized on the cover of the Company's house organ, is told in a rippling melange of anecdote, esthetics and idealism. "Dat feller is painting God mitoudt seeing him," said one Croatian, sweaty with coal dust. They like it and are proud to work for "Hydraulic." Beneker has a flair for the descriptive title to catch the worker's imagination--" Galvanized American " "Men Are Square," Gray Matter " ("portrait" of a huge hydraulic press). He traces the lineage of Industrial Art to Velasquez and his Forge of Vulcan, painted in Italy for Philip IV of Spain.