Pictures to Last 1,000 Years

A woman has learned how to paint pictures that will last forever--or at least 1,000 years--but now she can't paint them any more. For ten years tall, dark-eyed, strikingly chic Chicago socialite Buell Mullen crusaded for an art new-fashioned to fit a chromium, copper and aluminum age and developed a method of painting on metal. Now she has only enough war metal on hand to see her through this year. A mural commissioned by International Business Machines has been shelved for the duration, because neither she nor the company cares to ask for a priority on the necessary steel. She can still paint on silver and gold, but hopes technological strides will release less expensive materials.

The metal method was evolved through rigorous experimentation. Mrs. Mullen left her paintings out in snowstorms, stowed them in damp places, cooked them on hot radiators, to see how they would take it. Using a surface prepared by etching and acid, with tested paints and finishes, she learned how to accomplish a sound union between the metals and oils.

Mrs. Mullen's results are rarely as heroic as her efforts. Already on their way to the 1,000-year-distant scrap heap are her portraits of Conductor Eugene Ormandy in chromium; Governor Herbert Lehman in britannia, Nelson Eddy in aluminum, General John Pershing (in stainless steel on the observation car of Burlington's General Pershing Zephyr). She has done others in pewter, gold, brass, glass and wood. Recently at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Navy officials dedicated her stainless steel murals Hong Kong Harbor and London Pool--two great scenes of British shipping.

Luminosity, precision, an illusion of floating through flawless air are effects she strives for and sometimes gets in the new medium. Her Naval Academy murals are excellent. A portrait of Mrs. Mullen's son on a tricycle, on view in the window of Chicago's Findlay Galleries, once slowed up traffic considerably on Michigan Avenue. There have been other unreckoned results.

People who look at her portraits are apt to find themselves disconcertingly in the picture, by reflection. A well-grounded, competent artist in her own right, Mrs. Mullen concedes with reluctance that her material is now materiel. She says sadly: "If people would realize that a sheet of 10-gauge steel 6 by 18 ft. would only make one and one-half inches of battleship plate, and even then it's too thin to be of any use! . . ."

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