MAIMED EAGLE

AMERICA has had more than its share of unhappy artists. But Louis Eilshemius stands out as a prime example of genius blighted by the world's indifference. In 1941, the New York Herald Tribune headlined: EILSHEMIUS, 77, DIES IN BELLEVUE, PENNILESS, BITTER. AND FAMOUS. The fame that came too late has been growing sporadically since. In Manhattan last week the Artists' Gallery hung the biggest survey of Eilshemius' art to date.

The son of a cultivated New Jersey importer, Eilshemius was born to wealth, studied art in Europe traveled through Spain (where he painted Malaga Beach), Africa and the South Seas. He began exhibiting early, seemed destined for glittering success. He had mastered a broad and airy impressionism, not so brightly lit as that of his French masters, but softly luminous. What queered his career was a strain of fantasy: he introduced into his atmospheric pictures incidents of a naive sort--lubricious, melodramatic (as in Jealousy), somewhat wooden.

People laughed at them, and so finally, after 35 years of trying, Eilshemius quit art. A cranky, messy, bearded bachelor, he lived with a churchmouse of a brother and an old housekeeper in the family's Manhattan brownstone on East 57th Street. The last 20 years of his life were devoted almost exclusively to barren eccentricities designed to promote himself. In endless letters to the newspapers he ranted of his unjust fate. The letters were signed "Flashful Inventor," "Supreme Spirit of the Spheres," or simply "Transcendent Eagle of Art."

Eilshemius' muse was wayward, poetic, and in the end cruel. Critic Duncan Phillips notes that in one picture Eilshemius "symbolically depicted himself as adrift, all alone, in a fragile bark rushed along by the fierce currents of wild, rapid waters which swirl around an island under a witching moon. It is a symbol of all futility and frustration under the Tantalus of beauty and romance. It tells of his endless efforts to land on the island of desire."

Though Eilshemius failed to land on his island, he did at least paint some disturbing pictures of it, and they live.

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