Les Girls

"Art is a man's world, and people have a prejudice against women artists. And rightly so, because most women artists are lousy. As a rule they paint little, squidgy, fancy things, all prettied up like valentines, and I don't blame the public for not liking them." The speaker, whose signature is simply "Marx," is as masculine as a powderpuff. Marcia Marx Bennett, 26, is a wife, mother--and a good painter. Last week the pretty blonde from Newark had a smash hit show at Mexico City's Institute Nacional de Bellas Artes, the first American woman painter and the second American ever invited to hold a one-artist show there.

The acceptance of U.S. women painters in galleries abroad is a comparatively recent phenomenon, but Marcia Bennett's triumph was far from an isolated example. Two other American women are winning rave notices from European art critics, as if to help Marx disprove what she had said.

Splash in Mexico. A child painter who won her first prize when she was twelve, Marcia Bennett bucked parental objections ("My father thought I would wind up barefooted living with a gigolo in some basement") to follow through with an art career after studying at Columbia and Yale. Married to a Washington, D.C. businessman, Marcia fell in love with Mexico on a vacation trip, persuaded her husband to go into business there as a mining engineer. She soon managed to become a friend of such conflicting personalities as Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, David Siqueiros. Her splashy, arresting style is strong on color and well suited to her subject matter, e.g., a moody painting of Chapultepec Park's beer garden at closing time. Marx will show her works in Dallas and Houston in the spring, have her second baby in June, and in August set off for Paris.

Broadway in Paris. Marcia will find that another U.S. woman painter has already been in Paris. Sylvia Carewe, the 5 ft.-tall, 43-year-old wife of Carter's Little Liver Pills Executive Marvin Small, had a solo show at the Left Bank gallery of Katia Granoff last week and received critics' salutes rarely fired off for visiting talents. She also sold ten of her 22 canvases at prices ranging from $500 to $1,500. After 14 years of painting, nine of regular showing from Ball State Teachers College in Muncie, Ind. to Manhattan's Whitney Museum, Painter Sylvia Carewe could now at last consider herself as "arrived."

Painting in two distinct styles, Sylvia Carewe on one hand picks up her beat from the visual excitement and energy of Manhattan, transposes it into semiabstract scenes, e.g., an air view of Broadway done with splash and sparkle. With her other (and heavier) hand, she trowels on paint inches thick, won French critics' praise for a "violent, colorful art, in hard contrasts, not exempt from cold lyricism."

Tragedy in Barcelona. The excitement in Mexico City and Paris was mild compared to the roaring ole that has greeted the latest shows of 20-year-old, Manhattan-born Joan Markson, who signs herself with an Italianate flourish as "Giovannella." At her first show four months ago in Madrid, one critic wrote, "She approaches Goya . . . approximates Rembrandt . . . will have an outstanding name in the painting of our time."

With a17-canvas show in Barcelona last week, Joan Markson got repeats in raves. Said the art critic of La Vanguardia, one of Spain's leading newspapers: "This woman paints like a man, a man named Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Goya." In the present heyday of abstraction, Joan was painting, and painting well, in the manner of the old masters.

Precocious with the brush, she began watercolors at four, so inspired her father, Handkerchief Manufacturer Oscar Markson, that he and his wife decided to devote their lives to fanning her spark. When Joan was 17, the Marksons took her abroad to visit the museums of London, Paris, Rome and Madrid, found she was so overwhelmed with the Prado Museum's Goyas that they decided to settle at Madrid's Hotel Savoy. Catching fire from the masterworks of the past. Joan began painting a world she barely knew--a Castilian shepherd, a beggar in a Tangier marketplace, a tortured, floodlit face of Christ. Fascinated by bullfights, Joan saw matadors differently from most people. She explains: "To me, a matador is muscles and grace. Why cover his power with pants?" Aficionados seemed to approve. Said Barcelona Art Critic Mariano Sanchez de Palacios: "She has illuminated the tragedy of the spectacle."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.