Monday, Jan. 22, 1951

The Sunny Side

Some of his more sobersided fellow artists deplore Marcel Vertes. They sneer at his "commercialism" (he does covers for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, along with book illustrations, perfume ads, ballet sets, china, furniture, silk print and needlepoint designs), but can't help envying his commercial success. They scoff at his preference for pretty and elegant subjects, but have to admit, gritting their teeth, that Vertes (rhymes with bear says) draws and paints very prettily and elegantly indeed. They call him superficial, forget that such masters as Fragonard were too.

Moreover, Vertes bubbles with ideas that other artists wish they had thought of first. Last week a Manhattan gallery put the results of Vertes' latest notion on show: 20 portraits of famous people painted as Vertes imagines they must have looked in childhood. Most of them pretty and all more or less penetrating, the portraits were done with a feather-light virtuoso touch reminiscent of Manet. The drawing was sketchy but never scratchy, the colors pastel but never pasty.

Bad Little Mouth. The artist began the series eight months ago with a picture of his wife as a little girl. "It's nice," their friends said, "but you could never paint one of a bearded man as a boy." Vertes accepted the challenge, sat down to paint a juvenile Bernard Shaw. "When an Englishman or an Irishman has a beard," he figured, "there must be a reason. I looked very well at grown-up photographs of Shaw, and I found his bad little mouth and sharp little chin. I painted him at the age of twelve so I could show his arrogance too."

The project grew on Vertes as he worked: "I happened to be reading Mrs. Roosevelt's autobiography. She wrote she was a sad little child, so I painted her that way. Then somebody said, 'Why don't you paint Einstein with his little violin?', and that was enough. Churchill was obvious. He said himself that every baby in the United Kingdom looked like him. Garbo I imagined as a pale green little girlbeautiful always, but I'm sure she was green as a frog. I'd seen so many photographs of the Duke of Windsor, I did not have to look at more, but I did look at the Wally Simpson of today, and because I do believe in destiny, I put them on the same canvas with a rock and a fog as separation. The two people already there waiting for each other."

Polite Little Smile. One of the most charming portraits in the show is of a beautiful five-year-old in a sailor suit, meant to be Vertes himself. At 55, he looks like a heavy-set Mephisto, whose brow, nose and mouth form three emphatic Vs. "My friends," Vertes admits, "smile a little at my self-portrait and say very politely, 'I don't think it's too much you.' "

As a boy, Vertes had a passion for airplanes, took mechanical training in his native Budapest. One day, trudging home smudged and weary from school, he met his elder sister on the street. All dressed up and on her way to a party, she cut him dead. Vertes went home and cried. His sister later returned, joined him on their balcony overlooking the Danube and told him he must train for classier work. "I was very sad," Vertes recalls with a grin, "and had death in my soul. I was a mistaken, broken man at 14. My sister said, 'Why don't you be an artist? Then you can have a nice studio with a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace, and pretty girls to pose for you!'"

Precious Little Time. That decided Vertes. While still in his teens he made a name for himself in Budapest as a cartoonist. At 23 he was in Paris, earning a living by drawing ads. He preferred picturing the haut monde, though he had no part in it. At night, Vertes would make the rounds of the nightclubs, tell the headwaiters he was looking for a party of friends, and stand for a few precious minutes drinking in the scene. His sketches of what he saw were taken up by Paris magazines, and Manhattan ones followed suit. Vertes became rich enough to take his pretty wife and a party of friends anywhere and pick up the tab.

Today he divides his time between Paris and Manhattan. He still earns a heap of money by sketching the wide-eyed, narrow-hipped girls with skyward-tilting noses and bosoms that have become his trademark. But Vertes is also giving more time than ever before to more serious work in oils. He has no patience with modern painters who believe that "the pretty is ugly and the ugly is pretty." Both by temperament and conviction, Vertes believes in painting the sunny side of the street.

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