Ultra-Grey

More than 100 critics of Art and Literature crowded into a Manhattan soda fountain at No. 1410 Broadway last week. Their purposes were: 1) to imbibe what flowed from the fountain's spigots; 2) to see the room the fountain was in.

Behind the bar, clad in white jacket, was the creator of both: versatile, temperamental Artist Author Inventor John Vassos. The room he had created was more original than the spigots. The upper parts were of aluminum; the lower painted grey. Grey predominated, even in the hangings and the seat coverings of the modern furniture, although some of these were Chinese rose or black. Only other color: green spigot handles. One of the critics called the designs "irrational versatility."

Pumping the green spigot handles. Mr. Vassos explained: "The crowd that comes in here is grey. That is why my dominant motive is grey. . . . When you understand what I am doing, setting off the grey by the ultragrey, you will like it even better."

Best known in the U. S. for his illustrations of Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol (to prepare for which he lived in six prisons), Mr. Vassos began life in Constantinople, "son of a Turk and a Greek woman from Olympus." He cartooned on a Turkish newspaper but was ousted for sacrilege in 1915. He joined the British armies in Palestine, was transferred to minesweepers in the North Sea, was torpedoed and rescued by the U. S. Navy. Carried to the U. S., he lived by painting butchers' signs until commissioned to do the Wilde illustrations.

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