Ibiza's Hoover

In the Delphic Studios last week, Mary Hoover, the only U. S. muralist ever to graduate from the chorus of Earl Carroll's Vanities, held her first Manhattan show with 28 bright, clear-cut canvases painted during the past two years in the little Balearic island of Ibiza. Her most effective pictures were a portrait of an island bartender, pouring a drink of brandy before a row of gaily labeled bottles; a girl in a striped blouse playing cards; a patient, silver-grey donkey with dejected ears.

Of her work Critic Elliot Paul wrote: "She has no formula. Each painting is a separate problem, and her palette is rich and varied enough to deal with it freshly." And even conservative, bang-haired Royal Cortissoz spoke largely of her promise.

Artist Hoover was born 27 years ago in Cuba, N. Y. where her father, a civil engineer, was laying railroad track. Part of her childhood she spent in the town of Snow Shoe, Pa. In Washington, D. C. she used to attend art classes at the Corcoran Art School but her real ambition was to be a ballet dancer. Just out of high school she won a beauty contest, and in the ensuing years did almost everything from performing in the Vanities and dancing in a Coney Island hotel to teaching swimming at a girls' camp and operating the telephone at Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre.

Mary Hoover studied painting with lusty George Luks and Provincetown's Charles W. Hawthorne. She won several scholarships, continued her work at Fontainebleau and at Munich, suddenly developed a great interest in modern young Spanish painters. The murals and zinc plate etchings of Luis Quintanilla in particular fascinated her. She pulled wires to see if she might study under him or be his assistant.

Luis Quintanilla at that time bore much the same relationship to the then Socialist Government of Madrid that Edward Bruce of PWA fame does now to the New Deal in the U. S. He was a great friend of Madrid's Socialist Boss Indalecio Prieto, had just been commissioned to do a series of enormous murals in the Casa del Pueblo and the University. Knowing nothing about Mary Hoover except that she ate well and drank well, Artist Quintanilla took her on as his assistant, taught her to paint in fresco, kept her slaving on a scaffold all summer long.

The murals finished, Artist Hoover went off to the squids fishermen and olive growers of Ibiza. There she stayed two years, painting all day, playing bridge and drinking local absinthe at night. When she returned to Madrid last October, a revolution was going full blast, the streets were raked with machine-gun fire and the conservatives had locked up her old teacher as a Socialist conspirator, threatened to keep him in jail for 19 years (TIME, Dec. 3). The effect was about the same as if the Republicans should seize the Washington Government, throw Artist Bruce into a cell as a dangerous New Dealer.

Every day,, pretending to be his sister, Mary Hoover called on Prisoner Quintanilla, found him infuriated but comfortable, hard at work painting a portrait of the warden who was hugely pleased. On top of the excitement of her first Manhattan show, Artist Hoover last week received even better news: the Spanish Government had relented to the point of letting Luis Quintanilla out on 3,000 pesetas bail.

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