51 Portraits

Is she beautiful? Is she thin, fat, dropsical, anemic, senile, kittenish or reptilian? Last week Manhattanites asked these questions about Maria Lani, French cinemactress. For in the august Brummer Gallery was an exhibition of 51 representations of this one woman. She was "done" in marble, metal, paint, on a platter, on a piece of glass.

There were 47 works by French painters and sculptors, two by French poets, one by a dressmaker.* With the exception of Pablo Picasso, almost every famed name in modern French painting was represented. Henri Matisse saw Lani in three lines, Andre Derain painted her very swarthily, Haim Soutine as a Spectre. One painter gave her 14 eyes, another seven, another one. She was seen as a machine, as a horned toad, as a Negress. Galleryman Brummer shrewdly put no photographs of her on exhibition.

Marie Lani lives in the Montparnasse (art colony) section of Paris. Amused at her facial mobility, a few painters sketched her; she showed the results to her friend Galleryman Joseph Brummer. He became enthusiastic, told her to get a dozen or so and he would exhibit them. The Editions des Quatre Chemins of Paris has issued a book of reproductions of the portraits.

The significance of these portraits, some studied, some perfunctory, seemed to be that there is little unanimity of trend or vision, at least in France, among contemporary artists.

Marvellous Show

A Jesus, painted yellow and green, looked down past his canvas feet last week into the appraising eyes of Sir Joseph Duveen.

"Marvellous!" said Sir Joseph. "Wonderful!"

It was at the formal opening of the heralded Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan (TIME, Sept. 16). Invitations had been sent to many a socialite and artist. With Sir Joseph was his daughter Dorothy, more of a modern art enthusiast than he. Around them were Collectors Duncan Phillips and Chester Dale; Lee Simons, onetime editor of Creative Art (TIME, July 9, 1928); Norman Bel Geddes, jack-of-all-design; William Cropper, arch-rebel draughtsman; Mrs. John Davison Rockefeller Jr.; Editor Frank Crowninshield (Vanity Fair); Director Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. On the walls were hung 98 canvases by the four "old masters" of modern painting: Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh. Many a guest at the opening could well remember the time when these men were not even subjects for polite conversation. There had been unwholesome tales of Gauguin, the stockbroker who deserted wife and child for the allures of Tahiti; Cezanne, the vitriolic rebel of the '90s; Van Gogh, the lunatic. They had been accused of "war madness" and of corruption. But such misgivings had long been allayed. On Monk's cloth the canvases hung, beauteously framed, expensively lighted. All around stood pillars of society. Together they murmured with Sir Joseph: "Wonderful, marvellous."

Fossil-Hunting

The joke about hanging modernist pictures upside down and no one the wiser became last week an embarrassing fact. Manhattan's National Academy of Design not only hung a picture submitted for its winter show sideways, but after severe scrutiny by its expert jury of selection, and after even severer scrutiny by its even more expert jury of awards, composed of five preeminent academicians, it gave the picture second prize in the show. Then they sent for the official photographer, that the press of the nation might know what they had done.

The photographer came and looked at the canvas. He read the title: The Fossil Hunters, by Edwin W. Dickinson. It was a curious picture indeed. The photographer could make out a grindstone in one corner, a depressed-looking young woman in another corner, another female figure which was either sailing on its back or standing on its head, and an old man with a twig in his hand. The rest was all light and shadow and twisted draperies. Wherever the titular "fossil'' was. it was not visible.

The photographer was puzzled. He asked attendants to take the picture down. On its back he saw the words "bottom" and "top" written on each side of the canvas. He smote his brow.

Attendants telephoned academicians, who telephoned Artist Dickinson in Provincetown, Mass. Yes, said Dickinson, he knew his picture had been hung sideways. It had been hung sideways at the Pittsburgh International Show last month, too. But he had said nothing about it because he did not want his painting "to attract attention on other grounds than its merit."

Hilarious art students and non-academicians wondered whether, if Artist Dickinson's picture had been hung properly, it would have won first prize instead of second, or whether it would have won no prize at all. Said one critic: "The fossils are the members of the National Academy of Design. . . ."

*Paul Poiret, famed and fat Parisian couturier, is a jack-of-all-arts, paints moderately well.