Mechanical Muralist

Landscape gardeners, trapezists, mural painters and elephant trainers have this in common: they need a great deal of space to exhibit their wares. Mural Painter Henry Billings of Manhattan solved the problem last week by obtaining the use of a whole vacant floor in the modernistic new Squibb Building to show his designs.

The press was enthusiastic. Henry Billings' pictures average about ten by six feet apiece, all are based on modern machinery, are intended as projects for murals in factories, skyscrapers, air terminals, railway stations as yet unbuilt. It is the Billings theory that colorful, firmly-painted abstractions, based on worm-gear drives or air-cooled radial engines, six-cylinder motors, steam engines, are more suitable for modern buildings than nymphs, satyrs or noble Red Men standing on the site of Number Six smelter. Even the most cautious critics admitted last week that the Billings murals were different, decorative. Artist Billings's good friend Murdock Pemberton of The New Yorker went further, called them "as thrilling as anything in town at present."

Large, slightly morose Henry Billings is 29, a grandson of Civil War Surgeon John Shaw Billings, who was first director of the New York Public Library. Educated at St. Paul's School, he was considered in sufficiently intelligent to be graduated. He studied painting at the Art Students' League, worked in architects' and engineers' offices in New York. A member of the picturesque Woodstock, N. Y. summer colony, he lives as far as possible from the clanking, roaring machines he glorifies.

Muralist Billings realizes the most obvious objection to his machine murals. Says he: "The man who uses machines or is conscious of their use all day long, would like to forget that they exist during his periods of relaxation. He has yet to realize that it is impossible to forget them since :hey have become part of his life, just as the food he eats and the clothes he wears have become part of it."

Disgusting Genesis

Ever since the forceful, forbidding bas-relief of Rima-- was unveiled by Stanley Baldwin at Hyde Park in 1925, the work of Jacob Epstein, U. S.-born, London-dwelling Jewish sculptor, has been big news to the British Press, bitterly attacked by the conservative, enthusiastically praised by enemies of prettiness. Last week the newest Epstein, a 6-ft. marble called Genesis, was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries. The storm broke the next morning. The statue is of a heavy, brooding, pregnant female figure with the synthetic Mongolian features of most Epsteins-- low forehead, slanting eyes, Negroid nose, mouth and chin. The upper part of the erect torso is realistically rounded. The lower part is an. exaggerated rotundity of all anatomy. The thighs (they are cut off just above the knees) are portly kegs. Focus of all the curves is the gestation. Commented the Daily Express: "You white foulness! This man cracks bad jokes with a chisel!" An interpreter: "It is supposed to illustrate a passage from the Book of Revelations how a woman 'clothed with the sun and with the moon under her feet . . . appeared in Heaven . . . and being with child, cried.' " Sculptor Epstein: "Rot. My Genesis is not based on any passage in the Bible." Commented the thoughtful Observer: "If an explorer were to discover Mr. Epstein's Genesis in an African jungle tomorrow, he would stand before it in respectful wonder. But when the same man discovers it instead at the Leicester Galleries he is more likely to mutter one word, 'disgusting!' " Answered the sculptor: "It will play an important part in any historical museum."

Timkens Bearing Gifts

Last week to the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery went Mr. & Mrs. Henry Holiday Timken (roller bearings) of Canton, Ohio bearing as gifts three large and very expensive oil paintings: a Penitent Magdalen by the 17th Century Spanish sentimentalist Murillo; a Sybil by Murillo's contemporary Ribera, exhibiting his usual spotlight effect; and largest, most expensive of all, a Holy Family presumably from the brush of Peter Paul Rubens. Because Rubens is known to have employed a factory of pupils and assistants, and every Rubens painting is suspect, the usual battle of Rubenographers arose last week. Two similar Holy Families exist, one in Windsor Castle, one in the Manhattan Metropolitan Museum. Rubenographer William R. Valentiner of the Detroit Institute of Arts stoutly insisted last week that the Timken canvas is genuine, the other two the work of pupils. Rubenographer Joseph Breck of the Metropolitan Museum as stoutly defended his Rubens as the original. King George V maintained a dignified silence.

*Bird-girl heroine of W. H. Hudson's novel, Green Mansions.

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