Prisoners & Physicians

At 6.30 a.m. the prison day begins. Bells sound. . . . --Warden Lewis E. Lawes of Sing Sing.

In a large room in Manhattan's Grand Central Art Galleries were hung last week more than 100 lurid canvases. Critic Edward Alden Jewell of the New York Times had suggested the exhibition, Mrs. John Sloan, the artist's wife, had arranged it and Mrs. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt had consented to be a patroness. Every one of its pictures was painted in prison.

As if to escape the grey monotony of their confinement for crime, the artists, almost to a man, painted outdoor scenes, portraits, religious subjects in loud clashing colors. Only a handful busied themselves with prison themes. Sing Sing's Walter C. Brown had a garish interpretation of his jail's aviary; Michigan State Prison's Convict No. 15870 showed a hunched cellmate, a corner of the jailyard where straw-hatted inmates raked grass. Most arresting was a series of pencil sketches by Sylvia Carlisle of the Reformatory for Women in Framingham, Mass. depicting such routine incidents as The Rising Bell, The Bucket Line, Gymnasium, The Hospital. The anonymity of the convict's life she expressed by failing to draw features on any of her figures' faces. Even a starched-capped keeper with pince-nez and key-ring had no nose, no eyes, no mouth.

Aside from a lavish use of color the rest of the pictures from prisons had little in common. Many were copied from postcards, magazine covers, old masters. The best had a primitive quality. Work from New York's Clinton Prison at Dannemora, where are housed the worst criminals, showed the influence of Convict Instructor Peter J. Curtis, a onetime sign painter, who exhibited two grinning putty-faced crones called A Bit of Scandal and an aproned oldster taking snuff. Other pictures included a likeness of Abraham Lincoln, a Burial of Christ, romantic portraits of women, Indian scenes, dying Cossacks, pigeons, Chinese junks and a group portrait of the Dutch Royal Family.

Another art show by non-professional artists escaping from their environment is this week's eighth annual exhibition of the New York Physicians' Art Club at the Academy of Medicine. Sole medical subject in the show was medical in name only--Vitamins, a composition of a lemon, oranges, a grapefruit, potatoes, filled whiskey and milk bottles, by Club Secretary Dr. Henry Amabric Bancel. Dr. Walter Beran Wolfe showed a polychromed terra cotta Self Portrait with black lips, a plaster pictorialization of his name which consisted of a bear with a W in his left paw astride a wolf. The latter he called a "glyptogram." Dr. Frank H. Netter had a courteous portrait of Dr. Charles Norris, New York's Chief Medical Examiner. Opthalmologist Percy Fridenberg, club president, was represented by a series of vague flowers which he made by drawing on wood, cardboard or metal thickly spread with pastels, dampening sheets of paper and printing. Most finished painters were Drs. Henry Stuart Patterson and James Cook Ayer who have exhibited professionally. Other subjects ranged from a plaque of President Roosevelt to a Mexican market scene.

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