Independents

This year there were more than 850 items at the annual exhibition of Manhattan's Society of Independent Artists in which anyone may exhibit anything by paying $6 for wall space. Youth, often nude, was the keynote. Expression varied from abstractions in wood and rubber to the blushful romanticism of Victorian candy-box painting.

Virginio DeMartin in his Mono, Lisa in Paradise Dress had stripped Leonardo's inscrutable model down to a garish French postcard, not nude but naked.

Chicago Charity by Glenn Gordon was a one-legged young woman with a horrific smile, soliciting alms. The painting, like the subject, was scaly, repulsive.

As was the case last year, Arthur Weindorf, a piddling punster and an ugly draughtsman, was the worst offender. He depicted a woman leaning out of an upper berth in a pullman to whack a bald, bearded interloper with a slipper, and called it Birth Control.

But such silliness did not submerge the occasional excellence of the exhibition. Patterning after the Paris Salon des Independants in its opposition to tight orthodoxies, the Society of Independent Artists provides a more exciting display than conservative bodies like the National Academy. Such reputable painters as John Taylor Arms, Pop Hart, Robert Henri, Leon Kroll, Walter Pach. John Sloan (president of the Society) and Claggett Wilson were represented. Among other memorable contributions were Olive Rush's delicate water colors, tonal hints of New Mexican scene and character. Rudolph Tandler showed a briskly drawn and water-colored lighthouse. Attuned to the Moon by Madeline S. Pereny was a rhythmic arrangement of four Negro dancers, four Negro cymbal players and a flautist, all under a glowing moon.

There were two arresting works by a man named O. (for Otto) Soglow. One was a black and white study of a city street at nightfall. The casual silhouettes were expressive of simple, mundane destinies. Paris was an oil painting of a lugubrious couple and a stein of beer. The malty futility of a sidewalk cafe existence is a familiar subject, but Satirist Soglow had handled it with distinction.

O. (for Otto) Soglow is small and shy. He is a New Yorker born and bred, still in his so's. The city gave him odd jobs to do and odd sights to see. There was drabness on one hand, pomp on the other. Mr. Soglow grew with the former, protected by a wise detachment. Determined to study painting, he attended the Art Students' League of New York, where fundamentals are taught proficiently and inexpensively. There John Sloan was his teacher.

The Soglow ambitions are modest. He confines himself to vignettes. Sometimes they are smokily morbid, but the artist is more often impelled to bitter Hogarthian humor. As a regular contributor to the New Masses, he was (in the March issue) allowed to lampoon the staff of that earnest, proletarian monthly as a ridiculous, sour and impoverished quartet, weary of life and thought. O. Soglow is a signature frequently seen also in the blithely capitalistic New Yorker. There he is the Harpo Marx of art, maintaining a pungent silence with untitled comic strip exercises in pantomime, often verging on the vulgar. Recently the New Yorker has been repeating, each week, the same Soglow drawing of an open manhole, from which issue voices providing different captions:

"If it comes down to this, Bill, women are less sheltered than they used to be."

"At one time in my life, Bill, I was a voluptuary."

"What's the matter, Joe?" "Dammit, I came away without a handkerchief."

"Down there and first door to the right."