Independent Artists

Spring really comes to Manhattan with the yearly drums of Ringling's circus. But its premonitory word, its first delicious promise of impending carnival, is the opening of the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists.

Ten years ago these Independents had their first show. Having survived the cannonade of laughter that welcomed them, they proceeded, under the chaperonage of John Sloan, to exhibit year after year a freakish rout of paintings wilder than any parade of camels and elephants. The entire roof of the Waldorf is theirs to use; anyone who has painted anything can exhibit it there, and painters as remote from convention as sword-swallower, snake charmer, bearded ladies, send in their works--and are laughed at. And many of those who roused the stormiest guffaws ten years ago are now selling their canvases for $10,000 apiece.

What Picassos, Rousseaus, Matisses will crown the next decade? None of the critics who choked down their giggles as they studied the pictures of potentially immortal Independents could very well say. There were too many queer ones, new ones, sad ones, naughty ones, for a measured judgment. There was, for instance, a picture by a Russian, one David Burliul, in which he visualized the vibrations of modern city life in what he defined as "radio style." Eitaro Ishigaki, a Japanese, drew a picture of a phantom on the point of being crushed by a thousand falling elevated trains and run over by a horde of cockroach taxicabs. It was a "satire on the U. S. flapper." Noboru Foujioka painted some dejected cretins playing at cards, called it "American Spirit." And another member of the Jap-Manhattan school showed "evolution" as a tree with the body of an ape, burrowing worms for roots, a fruit of masks against a sky studded with glass diamonds. There was a wooden "bust" of Paul Whiteman by Guillermo Bolin which clearly demonstrated the jazz-priest's resemblance to a sea-lion. E. E. Cummings, poet, hung a picture of angels wrestling in a vacuum. Such tolerant and able academicians as John Sloan (President of the Independent Society), Walter Pach and A. S. Baylinson-- such earnest and successful strivers as O. Richard Reid, Negro artist, who worked his way through art school as a waiter and porter, and as Julia Kelly, who came untutored to the exhibition ten years ago and has recently got into the Luxembourg--leavened the works of their fantastic fellow members. New Yorkers came and stared--and went away to wait for the circus.