Hoax

Novelist Paul Jordan Smith-- of Los Angeles never meddled with the brushes of his wife, Sarah Bixby Smith, portrait painter. He liked her work, was content to stick to his pen while she stuck on her pigments.

But one day Los Angeles critics, reviewing a local art show, cast disdainful glances at an exhibit by Mr. Smith's wife, later tapped out on their typewriters with long, nervous fingers the snippy opinion that it was "distinctly of the old school." On reading this, Mr. Smith saw red, turned radical with a vengeance. He daubed upon a canvas the weirdest monstrosity conceivable to his infuriated imagination. It showed a crazily proportioned South Sea Island female, mouth crammed to oozing with banana, holding aloft a half-devoured piece of the fruit. In the background gaped a skull. Having splotched every color on the palette over his flamboyant picture, he entitled it, "Yes We Have No Bananas," stuck it in front of his fireplace. "That," said Novelist Smith, with an air of a man who has just done a good lynching, "is thoroughly modern."

Soon came a neophyte in modernism, saw the creation, glowed, murmured, "What a thought--sublime."

"I think it's pretty crude myself," ventured Mr. Smith, modest.

"Ah, but that is because you can't see into the artist's soul," rhapsodized the esthete. "It may even be a genuine Gauguin."*

The incident inspired Mr. Smith to further devilry. Affixing the signature, Pavel Jerdanowitsch, to the canvas, he changed the title from "Yes We Have No Bananas" to "Exaltation," sent the thing to the Exhibition of Independents at the Waldorf Astoria, Manhattan (1925).

The Revue du Vrai et du Beau (Review of the True and the Beau-tiful), French art journal, wrote under a reproduction of "Exalta-tion" as follows: "This artist has a distinctly individual manner in representing people and objects, and uses the brush to symbolize the sentiments. In this he is at times a little literary. . . . Pavel Jerda-nowitsch is not satisfied to follow ordinary paths. He prefers to explore the heights and even, if necessary, to peer into the abysses. His spirit delights in intoxication, and he is a prey to the esthetic agonies which are not experienced without suffering."

The journal followed the article with a letter to Artist Jerdano-witsch, requesting a short biography, a picture. Novelist Smith obliged. He let his beard grow Conrad length, posed before the camera with tortured brow, eyes popping with Muscovite anguish, his esthetically agonized face pressed against gentle fingers. He explained he was born in Moscow, came to the U. S. at the age of 10 with his parents, settled in Chicago, suffered from tuberculosis, sought health in the South Sea Islands, retreated into Southern California.

Other art journals inquired. In response other masterpieces dripped from the brush of Jerdanowitsch. One showed a jet-black Negress at a washtub, with socks hanging on a clothes line overhead. Displayed at the No-Jury Exhibition (Marshall Field's, 1926) under the title "Aspiration," it was selected out of 480 others for special praise and reproduction by the Art World of Chicago. Wrote Lena McCauley, art critic of the Chicago Evening Post: "It is a delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Hart and Negro minstrelsy with a lot of Jerdano-witsch personality."

Other Jerdanowitsches were bequeathed to the world. One showed a sprinkling of eyes against a dark background gashed by zigzag lightning flashes. To the uninitiated it looks like rash on a hairless dog. La Revue Moderne of June 30, 1927, grew ecstatic over this one, wrote about "this strange artist's inspirational paintings," recounted his troubled biography. Another of his inspirations was a woman kneeling before a totem pole in the Polar regions, its title "Adoration."

So seriously have the Modernists begun to take Pavel Jerdanowitsch that Paul Jordan Smith decided that the artist must die. According-ingly he exposed his duality through the columns of the Los Angeles Sunday Times. His chief delight seems to be that France, whence final decrees on the vague modern estheticism emanate, fell headlong Into his trap.

And Mrs. Smith is avenged.

*Paul Jordan Smith has written Nomad, Cables of Cobweb. This month he waits publication of his newest book, The Key to Ulysses. Also, he is editing and interpreting Robert Burton's Anatomy of Mel- ancholy. --Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), was a painter whose art was inspired by the primitive in nature, modified by a theory of sym- bolism in form, color, design. He declared that only in Tahiti, whither he retired, could he find proper stimulation for his work. His enthusiasm for the picturesque South Seas was shared by his good friend, Robert Louis Stevenson.