Feminanities

Hearing that the reputable Midtown Galleries were last week exhibiting the paintings of a lady named Minna Citron, Manhattan critics bustled round to have a look. They found a quiet, sharp-featured, well-dressed Brooklyn housewife of 38 with two sons and an interest in cooking and psychoanalysis who is artistically something far rarer: a feminine satirist, troubled not by man's inhumanity to woman but by the follies of her own sex.

Fifteen pictures and a group of preliminary drawings were on view, all grouped under the generic title of "Feminanities." Typical was one called Hope Springs Eternal. In a department-store basement a group of bedraggled female shoppers, including a spectacled schoolteacher, a colored wench and a draggled woman in a raincoat and hangdog stockings, are standing around a counter at which a pert blonde shopgirl is demonstrating some kind of face cream.

More earthy is Subway Technique: a leering woman with a bag of popcorn reacting favorably to the furtive advances of a subway masher in yellow gloves.

Like most modern satirists, Artist Citron is shrewd enough not to omit herself. A picture of a broad-beamed young woman sprawled on a stool and scowling at a drawing board is supposed to be a self-portrait. Minna Citron is actually much better looking. She was born Minna Wright of Newark, N. J. Henry Citron, to whom she has been married 18 years, is a Brooklyn paper box manufacturer.

For many years a pupil of Kenneth Hayes Miller, who paints similar subjects, Artist Citron is apparently essaying the well-known Miller technique, with the effect that her paintings paraphrase the work of Satirist Reginald Marsh. Her colors are the same, so is her drawing, so are her thin oils on gesso covered wooden panels.

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