Lepers' Water Colors

A bedridden, half-paralyzed artist named Edward Bruce lay in a bare, white-walled room in Washington's Emergency Hospital. There he got to thinking how much better his room would look if its walls were hung with a few water colors. He was in no condition to paint any himself. So he hung some paintings by contemporary artists and loved them. That gave Artist Bruce the idea of putting original water colors on the walls of U.S. hospitals. By last week it had produced an upsurge in the watercolor business.

As head of the Government's Section of Fine Arts, Artist Bruce, having commissioned many murals and sculptures for Federal buildings, last winter got a chance to put his water color idea to work. Mr. Bruce started with a $6,000 allotment from the Public Buildings Administration, picked the Marine Hospital at Carville, La., where some 400 lepers needed cheering up, and announced a nationwide water color competition. Bruce got together a jury of four well-known U.S. water-colorists (Eliot O'Hara, Charles Burchfield, John Marin, Buk Ulreich) and told them to pick 300 pictures, 200 to be purchased with Government funds, 100 with a Carnegie Corporation fund of $3,000. Pictures were to be paid for at a uniform price: $30. Any extra pictures the jury selected were to be sold to the public at the same price. A little over 10,000 entries were received from all over the U.S. Surprised at the high quality of the entries, the jury picked 300 for the lepers, and some 300 more. Chief Bruce bought water colors for two more Government hospitals (Fort Stanton, N.Mex., and Lexington, Ky.), organized a series of traveling exhibitions, gave the public a chance to buy the surplus. Soon Impresario Bruce had sold $10,500 worth to the Government, $3,000 worth to the Carnegie Corporation, $4,170 worth to the public.

Last week 200 of Bruce's Government-owned water colors were put on exhibition at Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art. Nearly all of them were U.S. landscapes: from New England farmhouses to California hills. Many were by such capable U.S. artists as John Edward Heliker, Adolf Dehn, Phil Paradise, Olin Dows. Many equally deft ones were by relatively unknown U.S. painters. Surprised by the variety of techniques and the splashy spontaneity of the pictures, Manhattan critics rated the show one of the best in recent years.

Impresario Bruce's watercolor campaign publicizes one of the arts most congenial to U.S. artists. Because his splashes of color on paper dry quickly and cannot be worked over, a water-colorist has to make his plans beforehand and embody them with lightning speed and absolute sureness of hand. Unlike oil painting where brush strokes may be laid on canvas, removed, changed with slow, well-planned deliberation, water-coloring is as fast and spontaneous as a tennis game.

Says Artist Bruce of his government sponsored hospital hatched boost to U.S. water-coloring: "I am just crazy about the new system. Why, people are buying not for the name but because they like the picture, not as a museum or a collection would buy, but only because the purchaser wants to hang the picture in his room. I have seen much worse pictures in museums. The public is overwhelmingly in favor."

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