Art: Artists in Residence

Every year more artists go to U. S. colleges, hired sometimes as teachers, sometimes just to paint while students watch. This fall sees a new crop of artists going to college. Some universities, like Iowa with Grant Wood. Wisconsin with John Steuart Curry, have put their painters on the payroll. Others beg for them, as they might beg for cinema projectors or laboratory equipment, from Carnegie Foundation. Since 1938 this organization has supplied a dozen artists in residence, with an average $1,500 for their keep, to colleges which it prefers to be smallish, inland. The lot which Carnegie doled out this year includes: one slightly shopworn illustrator, John Held Jr., to the University of Georgia; one up-&-coming muralist, Philip Evergood, to Kalamazoo College. A crack portraitist, Robert Philipp, goes to the University of Illinois on a $4,000 Rotating Professorship succeeding Dale Nichols (TIME, Sept. 18, 1939). The Foundation turned down Pennsylvania State College when they asked for a grant to keep Henry Varnum Poor around after he had finished a mural commissioned by the college (TIME, June 3).

To the University of Kansas City goes Spaniard Luis Quintanilla, able draughtsman and muralist, to start the first university school of fresco painting in the U. S. Artist Quintanilla will have 40 to 50 pupils, who will help him paint, on wet plaster in the Liberal Arts Building Auditorium, a real fresco, possibly of Don Quixote in a modern setting.

Most important change in artists is at the University of Iowa, where Grant Wood has long carried a heavy teaching schedule, and loved it. But for an artist who can command $10,000 a canvas (price of Parson Weems’ Fable and Sentimental Ballad), teaching at $4,000 a year is a definite sacrifice. Moreover Artist Wood paints slowly, fussing, niggling, spreading glaze after glaze to achieve the hard candylike effect that is his specialty. After a period of financial and marital difficulties (he has been divorced), Grant Wood resolved to take a year off to paint. Last week, a thoroughly happy man, he was producing once more, had enjoyed doing a portrait of his old Iowa friend, Henry Wallace, for TIME (see cover). His first one-man show in six years is scheduled for next March.

Grant Wood’s successor as mentor to young lowans is a youngish (36), tough-looking, tough-talking, tough-painting, handle-bar-mustached artist, Fletcher Martin. A husky onetime sailor and boxer, Martin is largely self-taught. His first oils and water colors, shown in San Diego in 1934, were done in his spare time as a printing pressman. The gobs and prize fighters Fletcher Martin used to sketch still flex their heavy muscles in his canvases; his Trouble in Frisco—sailors slugging, seen through a porthole—is owned by Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art.