Royal Academy

With flunkeys in scarlet posted at portals blossoming with hydrangea, the annual Royal Academy exhibition opened last week in London's Burlington House. Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald and his daughter Ishbel were first to arrive, followed by hordes of British socialites. The best-dressed gentlemen and worst-dressed ladies in the world gathered in the galleries, talked very loudly, paid but scant attention to the pictures. Less notable people, among whom was a bland Chinaman with a topper and a green orchid, found a few exhibits to interest them.

In the plethora of dull, traditional conceptions, Herbert Haseltine's black marble Aberdeen Angus Bull and Mark Symons' Crucifixion ("Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?") drew the most comment. In the latter, Calvary was peopled with a jeering crowd of moderns such as might be seen in any derisive London or Manhattan mob. There were the usual mannerly portraits of royalty. In one room Dame Laura Knight, attired in a white felt sombrero, with red pigtails coiled over her ears, was to be seen contemplating her own scenes of circus life, and Artist George Frederick Arthur Belcher stalked about, his ruddy face and bushy red eyebrows set off by a bright blue foulard stock. Women, young and old, crowded around Augustus John's portrait of London's rash theatrical favorite, Tallulah Bankhead, daughter of onetime (1917-29) U. S. Congressman William Brockman Bankhead of Alabama. She was pictured wearing the diaphanous salmon negligee which elicited so much gasping and sighing from the stalls during her recent London appearances in He's Mine.

Previous to the opening, considerable resentment was aroused by the fact that Dean Cornwell, famed U. S. illustrator, was being permitted to hang one of a series of Biblical paintings which had appeared, with text by Manhattan Adman Bruce Barton (Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn), in Good Housekeeping magazine. But those who had objected so noisily to this indignity paid little attention to the bright decorative scene, in which the feet of Jesus were being washed by the tears of a sinner, once it was on view.

As is customary, Tailor & Cutter, London's sartorial trade sheet, reviewed the clothes painted by artists upon their subjects. "The collar seam is incorrect, the sleeve is a catastrophe!" railed Tailor & Cutter at Sir William Orpen's portrait of Architect Guy Dawber. "Alas, all of Sir William's sleeves are wrong this year."

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