War & Realism

The story of Art for War's sake--represented since Pearl Harbor by Thomas Hart Benton's angry anti-Nazi allegories (TIME, April 6), by Government poster campaigns, by art classes in the Army--is not complete without the case of big, 50-year-old John Carroll.

Painter Carroll is, as it happens, mainly known as a painter of women--tilt-nosed madonnas who suggest fragile wisps of a moonlight reverie. Painted in foamy tones, with appealing childlike faces and flickering bodies trailing lingerie like the draperies of an El Greco saint, Carroll's women sell like hotcakes at $1,000 up. (An Italian laborer once slashed one from its frame and took it home to be "his woman.") His pictures are also collected by the soberest U.S. museums as examples of the finest contemporary U.S. art. They resemble (in an etherealized form) his pert, 100-lb., Ohio-born wife ("Pinky"), who has served as his favorite model ever since their marriage in 1936.

But John Carroll is a hairy-chested man with the saltiest vocabulary in Columbia County, N.Y. Born in a railroad car in Wichita--his father was trekking to California to settle as a cattle rancher--Painter Carroll studied for a spell at San Francisco's old Mark Hopkins Art Academy, finished two years of an engineering course at the University of California (playing fullback on the football team). On the side he punched cattle. After six months in a Cincinnati art school he joined the Navy in World War I.

Mustered out as an ensign in 1918, John Carroll painted pictures for a time of the inmates in a Macon, Ga. insane asylum, made picture frames for fellow artists in Woodstock, N.Y., designed stained-glass windows for Tiffany, made copies of old masters in the Metropolitan Museum. His first Manhattan show was put on by an ex-bartender named Daniel.

Then Painter Carroll's diaphanous women began to catch on. In 1930, John Carroll was named head of the painting department of Detroit's Arts & Crafts Society, where, lavishly paid by Patrons Edsel Ford and Alvan Macauley, he began to teach a worshipful flock of younger artists.

Long a foe of the Curry-Benton-Wood school of Midwest realism, barrel-chested Painter Carroll declares: "It gives us a view of American life through a knothole in a backhouse door." Like the late great Pierre Auguste Renoir, whom six wars failed to swerve from his preoccupation with female breasts and buttocks, John Carroll prefers women to barns, feels that good art is seldom inspired by current events or political ideas. A painter's job, he believes, is to idealize his subjects. "If I wanted to paint a picnic scene," he says, "instead of showing a picnic site littered with tin cans and bottles and rubbish, I would paint something that would make the spectator want to go on a picnic."

Last week, while he was getting in the last of his hay crop at his upstate New York farm, Painter Carroll paused long enough to let off a few expletives about what he considers the wholly unrealistic idea of Art for War's sake.

"Artists," he snorted, "are getting too goddamned pampered. All this 'Give the boys a chance to paint' makes me 'sick. I'd rather see them with guns in their hands. It does seem silly, doesn't it, to see a soldier with a paintbrush rather than a tommy-gun? Art will come out of their fighting. Art comes from experience, not just from the idea of keeping art alive. Hell, you have to keep the country alive!"

Of his own Navy service in World War I, he roars: "My feeling then was: 'By God, I'm getting into this war to fight, not paint.' "

As his contribution to this war effort he is raising beef.

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