First & Last

At New York's Delphic Studios Henry Arthur ("Art") Young, 60 plus, held last week his first one-man show. Said he:

"I had to pick out drawings that could be called representative. . . . Such a long job, out of 40 years of drawing for the old magazines, Puck, Life, The Masses, The Metropolitan, so I told Alma Reed (she runs the gallery) that it would also be my last show."

Paunchy "Art" Young has been a figure in U. S. journalism for nearly two generations. An old-line Radical, it is his proudest boast that he is the only U. S. cartoonist ever to be tried for sedition as a result of his pacifist pictures in the old Masses during the War. (Two jury disagreements resulted in a mistrial.) "Art" Young has two predilections, Hell and trees. His interest in Hell started as a boy when he used to pore over the family copy of Dore's Dante. . His first book of infernal drawings, Hell Up to Date was published in 1892. Another followed in 1901. A third appeared last week.* All these depict the plight of a race of pudgy little people who, all hot and naked, are pursued through dozens of imaginative infernos that mirror the modern world. Most of these drawings were made in his square, asbestos-shingled studio in Bethel, Conn., which resembles a shooting gallery. The quality of Art Young's drawing, like that of all extremely productive artists, is highly irregular. The best is almost worthy of that of his model and hero, the late great Paul Gustave Dore. Among the better Hell drawings is one entitled "Clock Conscious." Two other Hell drawings of note: "The Idiot Giant War," an obscene, pinheaded, hog-faced beast with ostrich feathers in his rump, gulping fistfuls of men from a great bowl ; "Trying to End it All," a pale and flabby Hellion, who has just slashed ineffectively at his nude paunch with a dagger.

Relics

Unlike the slick, undignified bargaining in London's Sotheby's and Paris's Hotel Drouot, art auctions in Manhattan's American Art Association-Anderson Galleries are conducted with eclat. Dealers and bidders sit in a sombre Italianate hall as big as a small theatre while the auctioneer intones numbers from his pulpit. Across a shrewdly lit, velvet-hung stage Negro attendants parade the objects to be sold. If the objects or their owners are of sufficient importance, the sale becomes a major date in the Manhattan social calendar.

That it was on both counts for five days last week. Fully 2,000 people at a time crowded the gallery. So many socialites jammed the front rows that one eager bidder at the rear of the hall had to perch on the back of a chair with a pair of binoculars and signal his bids as he got the range. On sale were the furniture, jewelry, silverware and clothing of the late Edith Rockefeller McCormick, eccentric daughter of pious John Davison Rockefeller.

The life & times of Edith Rockefeller McCormick are Chicago history. Most colorful of the Rockefeller children, her wedding to Harvester Scion Harold McCormick in 1895 was only surpassed in national interest by the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough the same year. In Chicago she succeeded Mrs. Potter Palmer as social arbiter, gave vast and lavish parties, backed the Chicago opera for years before Insull. She used to buy dresses six at a time, all the same model. She thought nothing of spending $25,000 for roses to bower her ballroom. Suffering from a nervous disorder in 1912, she met Psychiatrist Carl Jung in Manhattan, followed him with her family to Zurich where she lived as his pupil and assistant for eight years. Returning to Chicago in 1921, she picked up a pudgy little Swiss architect, Edwin D. Krenn, brought him home as her social escort. Efforts to make a commercial success of the Krenn real estate firm in Chicago cost her most of her fortune. She died in a small apartment in the Drake Hotel in 1932 (TIME, Sept, 5, 1932) leaving five-twelfths of her estate to Escort Krenn.

On hand to participate in the auction of her relics last week were Mrs. Edward H. Manville, Mrs. Walter P. Chrysler, Mrs. John North Willys, Actor David Warfield, many another great name. Present, too, was Muriel McCormick Hubbard to buy as many of her late mother's belongings as she could afford. She spent $60,000 and got, among other things:

P: Two 16th Century Gothic hunting tapestries, each $6,100

P: Diamond & sapphire bracelet . . . 4,700

P: Diamond & pearl pendant . . . 4,100

P: Cromwellian silver candle or

posset cup . . . 2,600

P: Pair pearl & diamond earings . . .2,400

P: Chinchilla wrap with silver fox collar. . 2,400

P: Pearl ring . . . 2,300

P: Tournai (or Oudenaarde) Gothic

millefleurs tapestry . . . 2,100

P: George III silver wine coolers . . . 2,000

P: Aubusson silk tapestry screen . . . .1,900

P: Directoire carved acajou and silk

petit-point canape 1,025

P: Twelve George III silver plates $1,020

P: 18 pierced & chased gilded silver

dessert plates 900

P: Linen damask & Burano Point

de Venise lace banqueting cloth 900

P: Three dozen drawn-thread linen dinner napkins 675

P: Mahogany boudoir grand piano 525

P: Crown Derby gold-decorated & hand-painted porcelain dessert service.... 455

P: Pair embroidered linen bed sheets 85

P: Pair embroidered linen bed sheets 57

Out of a black velvet case appeared the high spot of the jewelry sale--Mrs. McCormick's diamond necklace, a glittering plastron of 1,801 stones, 40 inches long ending in a sort of jointed breastplate of diamonds. Dealers, many of whom were unable to get in the room, shouted bids through the door, raising the price $250 at a time. A quiet, unassuming woman in galoshes who sat with her husband on a bench against the wall finally bid it in for $15,000. Said she: "It's beautiful. It all comes apart, you know, and makes lots of bracelets and brooches and things." Known to every Chicago gossip columnist was the historic Bonaparte-McCormick gilded-silver dinner service of 1,600 separate knives, forks, plates, dishes, platters, etc., weighing over 11,700 ounces. Made by Napoleon's favorite goldsmiths, Martin Guillaume Biennais and Jean Odiot, executed after the design of Architects Percier & Fontaine, the service was a wedding present from the Emperor to his sister Pauline on her marriage to Prince Gamillo Borghese. In 1892 the Borghese family sold it intact to Prince Baucina who sold it to Dealer Ercole Canessa who sold it to Mrs. McCormick for $80,000. Last week it was subdivided in 146 separate lots and sold, after a block bid of $20,000 by Mrs. Hubbard had been refused, to dozens of different owners for a total of $57,565. Unnoticed by most in the room was a plump little man who kept nervously wiping his forehead and gazing first at Auctioneer Otto Bernet, then at Mrs. Hubbard as she bid $100 at a crack with the raise of a pencil. It was Escort Edwin Krenn. "All this is breaking my heart," declared this beneficiary under the McCormick will, with a wave of his hand. "It cuts into me, you know, it cuts into me!''

What cut into him deepest was that the sale of objects valued at well over $1,000,000 brought a total of $330,617.50. Of this the gallery extracted its customary 20% for advertising, cataloging and use of the hall.

In Chicago, at her greystone Lake Shore Drive palace and in Lake Forest, Ill. at her country home, Villa Turicum, the rest of Mrs. McCormick's private belongings were to go on sale next week. Auction gapers in Chicago were discouraged by a $10 admission fee, redeemable on the first purchase.

In the same Manhattan gallery where Mrs. McCormick's relics were being dispersed last week another sale of even greater interest to book collectors and professional patriots was being held. Assembled from various owners was an important book collection. There were second, third and fourth folio Shakespeares, Mary Baker Eddy's own copy of Science and Health, a Kelmscott Chaucer and a number of letters from Warren Gamaliel Harding and Thomas Jefferson. But the prize item was No. 264, an Italian leather frame holding a yellow sheet of paper, the original autograph manuscript of "The Star Spangled Banner."

Transcribed by Francis Scott Key from notes on the back of an envelope immediately after the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor, on the night of Sept. 13-14, 1814, it was given by the author to his brother-in-law, Judge Joseph Hopper Nicholson, who had a number of broadside copies printed at his own expense. The manuscript remained in the Nicholson family until the Judge's granddaughter Rebecca Post Shippen sold it in 1927 to Henry Walters, Baltimore railroad tycoon (Atlantic Coast Line, Louisville & Nashville). The price was said to be around $2,500.

The Star Spangled Banner manuscript was not included in the great collection of paintings which, with his house, Mr. Walters left to the city of Baltimore upon his death in 1931. Instead, as part of his private estate it was sent to New York for sale at public auction. When the news was broken to Mrs. Reuben Ross Holloway, a Colonial Dame, she issued a ringing pronouncement which ended:

"Come, Marylanders! A long effort and a strong effort to keep this manuscript in the State and in the city of Baltimore!"

Prior to the Manhattan auction, a paper manufacturer named Louis Schulman borrowed $5,000 to put to his own $10,000 to buy the manuscript and present it to President Roosevelt. Henry Jacques Gaisman, board chairman of Gillette Safety Razor, was willing to go to $7,500 to present it "to the American people." Before he could finish his speech bids went to $24,000 and the manuscript was sold to the ubiquitous Dr. Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach who calmed patriots by announcing that for a "small profit" he was acting on behalf of the trustees of the Walters Gallery. Thus the manuscript went right back where it had been for years.

*ART YOUNG'S INFERNO--Delphic Studios ($5).

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