Artist's Life

At Harvard, where his family name is so illustrious as to be a liability, Robert Hallowell was Lampoon president (1909-10), a member of Hasty Pudding, Signet, Stylus, DKE, and a great friend of rollicking John Reed. When a group including Classmate Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly founded the liberal New Republic in 1914, Radical John Reed encouraged Hallowell of the banking Hallowells to take the post of treasurer. Ten years later he suddenly quit, went to Paris, arranged a divorce, became an artist. At 52, Robert Hallowell died.

Last week, in the New Masses, Granville Hicks paid tribute to Hallowell's courage and discerned a lesson in his life: "You could not know Bob Hallowell without realizing the terrible human importance of the revolution. ... It means the release of human capacities that cannot function in the world we have now." Shocked and reminded, other devoted old friends such as Robert Benchley, Bruce Bliven, Walter Lippmann and Stark Young, sponsored an exhibition this week at the Reinhardt Galleries.

Robert Hallowell was not a great artist, but he was a natural one. He did vivid, honest water colors and first-rate portraits, including one of Revolutionist John Reed, which now hangs in Harvard's Adams House. Brought up a Quaker, he put his idea of art in three words: "Isolate thy beauty." Widemouthed, humorous, stubborn and good company, he earned praise, honor from museums and meagre keep for his second wife and their baby until Depression hit the art market. From 1935 to 1937 he was an assistant on the Federal Art Project. After that obscurity and poverty closed in. He wore himself out trying to design and sell andirons and door knockers, was in bitter straits when he died, three weeks ago, on Staten Island.

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