Nature Painter

Few modernist artists have tried to compete with nature. Most of them stick to simple subjects like barns, epicene nudes, apples and bunches of flowers, avoid such complex natural spectacles as sunsets, stampedes, beautiful women, the Grand Canyon. One crusty, white-bearded old U. S. artist who has been hot on nature's heels for more than 50 years is Manhattan's William Robinson Leigh. He has tracked old Mother Nature from East Africa to the U. S. Southwest, has painted more postcardy scenery than most men see in a lifetime. So chromolithographically faithful are Painter Leigh's canvases of jungles, deserts, wild animals and horses that the American Museum of Natural History hired him to do backdrops for groups of stuffed animals. He paints pictures that royalty understands and likes: the Duke of Windsor and King Leopold of Belgium both own Leighs.

This week 74-year-old Painter Leigh gave Manhattan gallerygoers a taste of nature. His 14 paintings and assorted sketches and drawings (at the Grand Central Galleries) depicted glowing Western canyons, Indian cliff dwellings, stampeding horses, luridly lit desert dawns and sunsets. Fifty-Seventh Street's sophisticates thought they looked as corny as old-fashioned magazine covers, but had to admit that few living artists could paint a prancing steed or a frightened herd of mountain goats as realistically as William Robinson Leigh.

Artist Leigh learned his nature firsthand, trekking up & down the Western deserts with his paints and brushes in his knapsack. In 1926 he went with the American Museum of Natural History's late ace taxidermist Carl Ethan Akeley on an expedition into East Africa to paint museum backdrops. Today, hale and high (6 ft. 2 in.) at 74, he lives comfortably in a trophy-laden Manhattan studio, helps his wife, Ethel Traphagen, collect costumes for the Traphagen School of Fashion, which she owns.

Crotchety Realist Leigh blames modern art on the Algerian War (1830-47), when the French aristocrats began drinking absinthe, and the "lower classes," with their vulgar ideas, began to dominate the art world. Says he: "It is not how a picture is painted that matters, it is what you paint. Some modern artists have sunk to imbecility, not pitiable imbecility but vicious imbecility." At his pet abomination, WPA art, he snorts: "The worst thing the Government could have done for the nation was to allow these thousands of dub painters to put those frightful abortions called murals all over the country, especially in schools where the nation's children are brought up on them. The only thing it can lead to is insanity."

Walt Disney's Burbank, Calif. studio has lately been flooded with requests for insignia designs from newly formed units of the U. S. Army, Navy and Air Corps. To fill these requests, Disney has put one of his artists on the job, full time.

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