In the Galleries

P: Last week Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art opened a "regional" showing of Philadelphia artists. The exhibition seemed to prove that there is no such thing as a Philadelphia "school." A bleak hospital room with red door ajar was called The Gate of Heaven by Artist Wayne Martin. Henry Cooper had a stooped oldster wheeling a cart through a narrow Paris street. A gingerbread corner store with bright green shades by Grace Thorp Gomberling was typical of Philadelphia's outskirts. Leon Kelly's Interior of a Slaughter House showed two men dwarfed by a large gory carcass.

Critics looked with special interest at the work of the three Pinto brothers--Angelo, Biagio, Salvatore--because they are proteges of Philadelphia's Dr. Albert C. Barnes and are included with his Cezannes, Matisses and Picassos in his big private museum.* Angelo was showing a blue-trousered dart thrower leaning against an amusement park counter tended by a pretty girl in red uniform ($300). Biagio, youngest of the three brothers, had a red-nosed clown with guitar ($650). Salvatore's picture of sprawling bathers at a public beach was priced at $650.

P: Yalemen recall the 1921 Yale-Princeton football game in which Right End Justin Sturm stopped Princeton's Gilroy from getting away for a touchdown, helped his team win 13 to 7. Since then Justin Sturm has been a minor investigator for Montgomery Ward, a laborer in a glass factory, a gang foreman with a Chicago construction company. In 1926 Harper Bros, published his first novel (The Bad Samaritan). Last week Yalemen and others were able to see Justin Sturm's latest accomplishment--an exhibition of sculpture at Manhattan's Ferargil Galleries.

Competent and strong, Footballer Sturm's portrait heads revealed more finish than would be expected from a man who studied only a few weeks at Yale School of Fine Arts, served a brief apprenticeship in drawing under John Sloan. Most appealing piece was a solemn Kewpie-like head of a child called Marnie. That Mr. Sturm was already developing a fashionable following was indicated by some of his other subjects: Washington's Mrs. George Eustis, Long Island's Mrs. Ellwood Hendrick, Thomas Hitchcock Jr., Hope Williams, Gene Tunney. Strongest of the lot was his deeply creased portrait of William McFee.

P: At the "daylight gallery" of the English Book Shop in Manhattan went on exhibition a group of etchings never before shown east of California. Californians remember John Kelly as an advertising man who gave up his job eight years ago, went to Honolulu, won honorable mention at last year's International Exhibit in Los Angeles. A shy Irishman, Kelly and his sculptress wife live year round in Hawaii, prefer natives to tourists. He dislikes exhibiting, does so only when his wife argues him into it.

Some of his aquatints of Hawaiian girls last week immediately reminded critics of Gauguin's sultry Tahiti wood carvings and oils. Unforced and simple, John Kelly's etchings proved him an able draughtsman. Hawaii visitors saw in his pictures a pleasing, accurate record of the island's scenery, water, natives and customs.

* Argyrol made Dr. Barnes his millions and Art his fame. His museum in Philadelphia is surrounded by a 10ft. spite fence, is opened only to close friends or students with top-notch credentials. The late Paul Guillaume, French art dealer, picked out and bought most of the Barnes Impressionist and Surrealist pictures. Today if Dr. Barnes singles out for his collection one unknown painter, that artist's reputation is supposed to be made. Dealers, therefore, treat him with kid gloves. Less scared of him is able, black-haired Belle da Costa Greene, who once closed the doors of her J. P. Morgan Library in Dr. Barnes's face when he wanted to get inside a few minutes after closing time.

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