Tough Esthete

Stages, scaffolding, a litter of broken plaster and a husky ex-cowboy occupied the small, tall Gallery of Contemporary American Art in the Detroit Arts Institute last week. Occasionally letting out a hearty "goddam" when something went wrong, the ex-cowboy was delicately daubing soft hues on the wet plaster walls, shaping dreamy, feminine figures.

Listening to John Carroll's salty talk, looking at his brawny arms and deep-tanned, seamy face, most observers would conclude that here was a man who, if he painted at all, would do something like the Rivera murals of Industry downstairs in the Institute's main court -- hard, realistic, packed with sharp detail, maplike in their bright, crowded colors (TIME. April 3, 1933). But Painter Carroll's frescoes were simple, subdued, purely decorative idealizations. One of them, called Morning, showed three gracile, rosy-fleshed women floating in a pale blue, white-clouded sky. Another, Afternoon, showed the same figures wan and drooping in a nimbus of yellow light. Evening, on which Artist Carroll was streaking soft browns and blacks last week, shaped up as a galloping white horse with a muscular male draped on its back, one arm encircling another ZaSu-Pittsian female (see cut}. "There is no complicated message in this set," explained Artist Carroll as he put the finishing touches on his first big mural job, financed by a $5,000 gift from Ernest Kanzler & wife, sister of Mrs. Edsel Ford. "I had an idea, and I wanted to fill the spaces beautifully. I felt that people who live their lives among machinery like to escape from machinery, so I strove for a poetic idea and tried to bring to this room a feeling of celestial shapes. I didn't want to name them, but the public demands titles."

His friends pass off the puzzle of the contradictory artist by saying he has a dual personality. Born on a railroad train in Kanas 43 years ago while his parents were migrating to California, John Carroll grew up in San Francisco and on his father's cattle ranch, boasts that he "knew" the Barbary Coast intimately before it was spoiled." He studied engineering at the University of California until his practical father gave in, shipped him off to study art under Frank Duveneck in Cincinnati. "After six months," John Carroll recalls, "I was sure I knew more about painting than Deveneck and he threw me out of his class."

In 1917 John Carroll joined the Navy, got into aviation and, sure he was going to be killed before the War ended, risked his neck whenever possible.l He says he could not be bribed to ride in an airplane now. After the War he settled down to the practice of painting , taught for one year in Manhattan's Art Student's League before he went to a well-paying professorship in the Art School of Detroit's Society of Arts and Crafts six years ago.

Another explanation of John Carroll is that he has a tough hide and a tender soul. The fluttering ladies of Morning, Afternoon and Evening have appeared, fragile but passionate, in many another Carroll painting. At Philadelphia's Sesquicentennial Exposition an Italian ripped his Lilith I from her frame, took her home to be his woman. Painter Carroll is also masculine and humorous at times. His famed Cowboy's Dream--a nude maiden on a steer's back--caused much talk at the Carnegie Institute show three years ago. Violently admired and derided, Carroll's paintings hang in many of the nation's up-to-date galleries, have won him a Guggenheim fellowship and many a prize, including a gold medal at San Francisco's exhibition of American painting in 1930.

John Carroll married for ten years to a musician and divorced in 1927, used to spend his holidays riding the range at the M Lazy V ranch near Kalispell, Mont. Now he has a 250-acre farm and four horses at East Chatham, N.Y., rides with the nearby Old Chatham Hunt Club, is proud that his experiments with beef cattle are beginning to pay. He never locks the door of his studio at Detroit's Scarab Club, often comes in to find friends dipping into his Scotch. He entertains them with cowboy ballads, plays his own accompaniments on a midget accordian or short-necked banjo. When guests get touch, Host Carroll grabs them by the scruff, jerks them off the floor, quietly warns, "Children, behave now. If you don't I'll have to spank hell out of you."

Painter Carroll has no use for the Wood-Benton-Curry school of Midwestern realism, thinks it "gives us a view of American life through a knothole in a backhouse door. If I wanted to paint a picnic scene, I would like to idealize it instead of recording the stark facts."

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