Independents' 2oth

Anybody with $5 and a picture by himself can get it hung in the Society of Independent Artists' annual exhibition. Last week the Independents' 20th show produced an impressive display of bad art, a few first-class pictures by successful Society old-timers and a few faintly promising works by unknowns. Notable was the scarcity of abstracts and revolutionary posters. On the principles laid down by the Society's vice president Abraham Walkowitz last week that "Every artist who hangs a picture here hangs only his conscience." the 20th show offered plenty of conscience hung, drawn and quartered.

William D. Allen's "idea-graphs" on laundry cardboard combined swirls like shorthand and such epigrams as:

The diamond in the eyes of the millionairess In the plush limousine SCRATCHED my eyes in passing

Ruggero Angiolini, member of the International Union of American Bricklayers, showed a picture of a naked young man lounging under a tree, "thinking about life" and entitled The Son of Civic Virtue.

An unintelligible structure of wires, metal joints, cans, an electric light socket, stove pipe and cellophane stood in the centre of the gallery, labeled Man of Manhattan by Pietro Lazzari. Ebbitt A. Levitz' Evolution of Crime showed a foreshortened dead man and, surrounding it, the story of how he got that way, beginning with a visit to a burlesque show. John A. Mapes, investment broker, contributed a delightful Bar Panel, The Fishing Party, showing Father Neptune and mermaids tugging from sea bottom on the line of a fishing boat at the top of the composition. Heightening the picture's excitement were an approaching water spout, a shark, several drunken fishermen, an octopus assaulting a mermaid and Mapes's realistic way of making his mermaids' breasts swim pendulously in water.

Ida Ten Eyck O'Keeffe confined herself to a nude woman entitled Why?

The accidents of the Show's alphabetical arrangement by artists' names brought side by side the works of Benito Nuno, patriot, and Benjamin S. Ovryn, revolutionary. Nuno's Our Leader presents President Roosevelt, glorified, benevolent, beaming at various U. S. phenomena climaxed by a copy of Motion Picture Magazine. For the Left, Ovryn gives the same central position in his study of The Imperial Way to Russia's Dictator Joseph Stalin, topped by a villainous crew of imperialists: Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller Sr., Britain's Stanley Baldwin, France's Pierre Laval, Pope Pius XI, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Not far from Ovryn is the patriotic work of Simeon Horace Pickering. Titling his picture The Red Octopus, Mr. Pickering interprets Joseph Stalin with red horns and red pointed ears. From Stalin's head extend over the map of the U. S. red tentacles labeled, "League Against War & Fascism," "William Z. Foster," "The Daily Worker" (strangling a factory), "Earl Browder" (strangling the Statue of Liberty), "Herbert Benjamin," "Harry Bridges" (strangling the U. S. Capitol) and "American Student Union."

Non-political Louis Poda's The Face That Haunts America turns out to be a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe.

The excuse for Hermann E. Thomas' smear of green ice and orange sunset is its title, I Dreamt It.

John Upley, Latvian blacksmith, tops the revolutionary pictures with one named Revolution in Bed, showing red, undressed small boys roughhousing in bed. A meticulous patriot, he also reproduces a plaque on a Massachusetts rock commemorating the visit in 1775 of John Hancock and Samuel Adams.

Strangest sculpture of the show is able Warren Wheelock's wooden head of William Randolph Hearst from whose eye-sockets shockingly jut two red corks. Title: Hearst Sees Red.

Far from bad were pictures by little known Esther Goetz. Ilonka Karasz, George Miki and John F. Stenvall. Neither good nor bad were famed Composer George Gershwin's two conventionally modern portraits.

First sale last week was of famed Louis Michael Eilshemius' landscape, Near Ithaca, for $100.

Excellent but unnewsworthy were examples of other famed members of the Society, Walter Pach, John Sloan, Stuart Davis, Rockwell Kent, Leon Kroll. Maurice Sterne and the late George Bellows, Maurice B. Prendergast. Glenn O. Coleman, "Pop" Hart and Alfred Maurer.

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