No Hatred

One day when he was seven, Max Band took his only pair of shoes to the village cobbler for re-soling. While he waited, barefoot, the cobbler fashioned a crude brush to varnish the new soles. He did it by pounding the tip of a stick until the fibers were separated and soft. Afterwards, Band ran home as fast as his new soles would carry him, made his own brush, and set to work on his first oil painting--using salad oil.

_ His paintings led Band from his Lithuanian village to Berlin, where he acquired a wife, and then to Paris, where he made his reputation. Finally he came to the U.S., where he did President Roosevelt's portrait, among others. His latest pictures, on view in a Manhattan gallery last week, still look a little as if they had been painted with a stick and salad dressing (he uses dark pigments, thickly smeared on), but the best of them have a melancholy force.

One small, Rembrandt-like study of a bearded old Jew outshone some of the more ambitious canvases. Band had illuminated the hoary, disconsolate head as if with a Gestapo searchlight (see cut). Journalist Pierre van Paassen has said that with such somber understatements Band has "indicted a civilization." But Band takes a differing view of his work. "Although I paint sadness," he says, "I don't paint 'against' anyone. There can be no hatred in art. I paint the oppressed only because I love him; never do I paint the oppressor."

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