One of Eight

In a thousand college notebooks students of the history of U. S. painting have taken notes on a little group known as "The Eight." Of these young painters, mostly from Philadelphia, four were originally newspaper illustrators, who fought to fame against the stilted classicism of academic painting in the early 1900's. Their particular and private gods were Edouard Manet, Velasquez and Goya. Referred to as "The Ashcan School" by outraged critics, "The Eight" were: Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, William J. Glackens, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast and Everett Shinn. They were men of vivid personality and all lived to attain considerable success of one sort or another.

Readers of mass circulation magazines have long known Illustrator Everett Shinn as the creator of slinky voluptuous ladies with incredibly long legs and arms. But it was as Artist Everett Shinn that he gave at Manhattan's Morton Galleries last week the first exhibition in four years of his serious painting, reminded critics of his worthy background. There was on view a little something for everybody. Unquestionably first-rate were Artist Shinn's early Paris street scenes and New York views in the same manner, to which he has recently reverted. One canvas, worthy of Toulouse-Laut

rec at his best, was called Outdoor Stage, Robinson, France and showed, in the yellow glow of footlights under the night sky, an attractive concert singer in a bustle.

For sentimentalists there were such pieces as the flashily painted Exit Clown, Ballet Girl and Harlequin, and the portrait of Sir Henry Irving as Shylock. And for college boys there were the Shinn nudes, mostly in pastel on colored paper with the high lights carefully brought out. There were enough of these young ladies gazing into mirrors (see cut), reclining on sofas, etc., etc. to outfit a dozen cocktail bars.

Others of "The Eight" may have been better artists but none, including the late, lusty George Luks, had a more adventurous life than Everett Shinn. A fat little Quaker boy in Woodstown, N. J., he was known as "Pud" (pudding) to his contemporaries. Now 58, "Pud" Shinn is as wiry as a fox terrier, is better known as "Eve."

His first job brought him $4 a week from a Philadelphia chandelier factory. Not long after that he was doing sketches for the old New York World. Fifty-one times he dragged his heavy portfolio of pictures in vain to swank Harper's Weekly to get a job; on the 52nd visit he succeeded with a winter scene of opera crowds streaming out of the Metropolitan which he had painted over night.

"Eve" Shinn has been married four times. His third wife obtained a divorce in 1932 on the grounds that her husband forced her to pose nude in an unheated room, offered nude photographs of her to his friends as souvenirs. Two years ago he married an extremely pretty girl of 21. When he was younger he practiced acrobatics until he became expert, haunted vaudeville theatres, performed somersaults in theatre lobbies, went home to try to repeat the stunts he had seen on the stage. Once he spent the night with a one-eyed Civil War veteran sitting on the 3-ft. hat brim of the 37-ft. statue of William Penn atop Philadelphia's City Hall. Just before dawn the oldster slipped off into the Founder's outstretched arms, unharmed.

Shinn has designed a rotary engine and an automobile. He won the commission for the enormous murals in Trenton's City Hall by building an eight-foot model of the building, through the windows of which the late John Roebling (wire rope) was delighted to discover a reproduction of his own Factory No. 9. He decorated the interior of the Belasco Theatre in Manhattan, has been art director for three cinema companies. And, best of all, he is the author of one of the most successful burlesques ever written: Hazel Weston, or More Sinned Against Than Usual. This Shinnanigan has been played continuously for 23 years and translated into seven languages. Year ago, along with Myrtle Clayton, or Wronged from the Start, it was bought by Warner Bros. for the cinema.

Newshawks found "Eve" Shinn in the middle of his gallery last week, re-enacting for the benefit of a few oldtimers another of his melodramas, dear to the author but less successful commercially than Hazel Weston. It was entitled Lucy Moore, the Prune Hater's Daughter. Leaping about the room, acting out each part and interpolating editorial comments, Artist Shinn gave his version of the plot. Excerpts:

"You see this fellow he not only hated prunes he wanted to ABOLISH them to crush the very germ out and gee whiz we had a swell machine on the stage with colored lights and the pits came out the end like bullets out of a machine-gun against a copper gong. . . . Bill Glackens* always was the villain, and he comes on with a long mustache covered with furs looking rich as hell. Lucy Moore spurns him 'cause he wants the machine as a prune pitter to make pies but wait a minute you haven't heard anything there's three more acts of it!"

Artist Shinn dines at 5:30 p. m. in order to spend his evenings working on still another drama, a morality play entitled Exterior Street.

*William J. Glackens, another of "The Eight" and long a painful disciple of Renoir, also held a retrospective exhibition in Manhattan last week. Critics were polite, could find little of his work as effective as the street scenes he used to do 35 years ago.

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