Paris Independents

Last week, the Paris Society of Independent Artists opened their annual exhibition. As has been the way wherever Independents are hung, there are exhibited types of the bizarre, the raffish, the grisly. Prominent in the Paris exhibit was a canvas by Gerald Murphy, Boston artist, which took first prize for the most unusual work. This, a "mechanist" depiction of a watch, appeared to the uninitiated to be a nightmare of wheels, ratchets, gagets, dials, cogs, cotters, springs. Students of modern Art, however, criticized it because it revealed too much preoccupation with the actual mechanism of a watch, instead of considering the entrails of a timepiece merely as so much abstract machinery. Second prize was won by the work of Jean Marcel Paul, eccentric Frenchman who, revolting against the tradition which makes a painting square or round, affects dissymetry in his frames. His latest work, The Passions, has 13 corners, 3 curves, resembling in outline a broken flint. Another, Carpe Diem, has the shape of a starfish. Exhibited was work by such U. S. artists as Achsah Brewster, Theodore Butler, Cameron Burnside, Irving Brokaw.