Freedom, Drunkenness

The Society of Independent Artists in Manhattan has for many years boasted of its exemption from any jury system of selection of exhibits. If an artist so desires, he can hang himself in the place allotted him. It is completely free from censorship. Everything offered is exhibited. This record is stained by but one smirch: a year ago a painter succeeded in executing a work which the Society felt it was unable to present.

This year, in the exhibition which opened at the Waldorf last week, everything submitted at curtain time had been accepted. Many of the paintings would hardly, however, be seen elsewhere than at the Independent's tableau. Wandering through the labyrinth of cubist, futuristic, abstract, satirical, constructionistic, or caricaturistic themes, spectators were impressed with the thought that each of these artists had expressed himself with no fear of jury. To be seen were:

"Two Blind Men In New York," which portrays chromatically an absolutely invisible panorama of the city.

A geometrical nude lady reclining on a crazy quilt which would have burned grandma's heart with envy, but who, withal, lends the impression of being a female, if not a lady.

A modeling of Calvin Coolidge with his face pinched into a fair imitation of an ice pick. He walks erect between two Russian wolfhounds which symbolize something.

"Kitchen, Bedroom and Bath" is a drawing of the famed three, located in Greenwich Village supposedly, in which the trio coincide. All are one room, and a small one. An inhabitant of the household disports in the portable bathtub while his mate fries a fish over the gas jet.

George Washington, father of his country, stands not far from a Yiddish scholar in another picture, melancholy in their modern environment.

"Venus `a la Mode" depicts a committee at work with tape measures and other engineers' paraphernalia measuring the head, arms, bust, waist, legs of a young miss for the spiritual title of "Miss New York," or Miss Philadelphia," it is not certain which.

"The Final Victor" by Arduino laricci, slashingly delineates Death Rampant--over the figures of Mussolini, Morgan, Clemenceau, Rockefeller, George V, etc.--with dread factories and battlefields in the background.

A conservative painting is that by Juan Oliver. In it are gentlewomen and gentlemen grouped about a grand piano in quiet poise. The men, oddly, wear clothes.

"Parisian Beauty Shoppe" shows with fearless candor the hellish machines and devices with which ugly dowagers become pretty.

"Delirium of the 18th Amendment" is a searching sarcasm on the Great Misfortune, depicting a doctor endeavoring to cram a medicine into the unwilling maw of his patient, confined in a straitjacket. This is a Japanese jibe, by Eitaro Ishigaki.

Constructionist artists have achieved stark realism by the use of silk, wool, glass, cotton and various other commodities in their paintings. One, a woman, put real iron bars before a picture of lions in a zoo.

Another strange sight is the displacement of the traditional still life vases and fruits by the cocktail shaker, lemon and square-shouldered gin bottle with Gordon on the label.

The subject "Bootleggery" receives official recognition in art for the first time with several pictures tracing the trail of unconstitutionally of thirst through the speakeasy, the gin party, the hangover, and on to the dire eventuality, Bellevue Hospital.

"African Gander," by Simeon Pickering, depicts rather startlingly, for the first time, a well-known young woman reclining on a sofa with no clothes on at all. A sad gander meditates her buxom figure while the young married woman herself contemplates a bowl of "peaches."

The devastating effect of the tabloids on public morals is shown by Beulah Stevenson in her "Purity," wherein are seen two horror-stricken women, drunk with the joy of morbidity. The headlines are not omitted, typical of the close-to-home-and-nature moralizing of the whole exhibit's soapbox eloquence.

Visitors at the exhibit catch themselves thinking, not of the lengths to which the artists go to prove their independence, nor of the distorted taste revealed in some offerings, nor yet of the clever wittiness of some; but on the contrary, of the reversion to that primitive state where artists find that their works are no more than mediums for expressing observations, where their paintings are like unto Aesop's fables, where their art becomes Dreiserian. . . .