Losch Launched

To thousands of U.S. cinemaddicts Dancer Tilly Losch means a pair of slanted, come-on eyes, a wide, exotic mouth and a series of seductive contortions. Last week, Dancer Losch (who is also the Countess of Carnarvon) was making her Manhattan debut as a painter.

Celebrities* who packed the Bignou Gallery saw 28 bright-toned, very rudimentary, intensely feminine paintings of gesticulating figures, dreamlike landscapes, surrealistic enigmas, glimpses of children's games. Some of the canvases looked as if they had been painted by the children in them; some were reminiscent of the French primitive, Le Douanier Henri Emilien Rousseau, or of French Modernist Marie Laurencin. Wrote Art Connoisseur Frank Crowninshield in one of the catalogue's two forewords (the other was written by Correspondent John Gunther) : "A curious and evocative order of magic; a gift of divination . . . the feeling of rhythm, or flow. ..."

Most striking Losch oil: Saga in Five Movements, which was five paintings in one and an allegory of the life of woman to boot. In it Woman 1) emerges hopefully from adolescence, 2) meets a lover under a tree in Eden, 3) wanders in solitude, 4) swings on a symbolic bar between heaven and earth, 5) returns to a home and children.

Collector Alfred (Argyrol) Barnes promptly snapped up Creek, a small painting of two dancing girls in sweeping skirts, one red, one blue, beside a pastoral stream in a green landscape.

Vienna-born Ottilie Ethel Losch, 42, has danced for three decades on the stage and in pictures like The Garden of Allah, The Good Earth, has married two wealthy Britons: 1) Socialite Edward F. W. James (brother of the second Mrs. Marshall Field), whom Dancer Losch married in 1930 (he divorced her in 1934); 2) the Earl of Carnarvon, son of one of the discoverers of Tutankhamen's Tomb, now a British Army Major. She began painting five years ago after being encouraged by Prime Minister Churchill's portrait-painting nephew John. Cried the Countess last week: "I am only going to paint forever. From now on it's art, art, art."

* Among them: Critic Walter Pach, Cellist Gerald Warburg, James Gerard (former U.S. Ambassador to Germany), Artist Constantin Ala-jalov, Correspondent William Shirer, Actress Constance Collier, Composer Howard Dietz, Actor Oscar (Jacobowsky) Karlweiss, Singer Lucrezia Bori.

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