Arts: Seven in Chicago

Seven Chicago artists last week had seven simultaneous one-man shows in the Chicago Art Institute, biggest one-man show spree in the Institute’s history. The seven Director Robert Bartholow Harshe had dredged from Chicago’s polyglot Bohemia included a Russian, a German, a

Scot, a Spaniard, a Pole and two U. S. natives. Rated best of the lot were the Russian, William Samuel Schwartz, and the two U. S. natives, Aaron Bohrod and Francis Chapin, ranking among Chicago artists along with the two Albright brothers.

Schwartz last week showed 14 symphonic forms, sultry, rich splotches of color into which had been thrown trees and unidentifiable objects. Now 39, Schwartz came to the U. S. at 17 from Smorgon, Russia, was successively steelworker, housepainter, restaurant singer before he got friends in Omaha to stake him to a year at the Chicago Art Institute. Since then the voluble little intellectual has won three Institute prizes. Unmarried, he lives in a two-room, cluttered studio, sometimes sings in vaudeville, has a government commission for a mural in the Fairfield, Ill. post office.

Bohrod is an able realist, somewhat after the manner of Charles Burchfield. A quality of charming naïveté arose from his photographically detailed landscapes into which he had put every broken bottle, trash heap, For Rent sign he had seen. In one picture the sign on a store, “Bohrod & Son. Est. 1934,” was painted in just after his son’s birth.

Bohrod, 27, Chicago-born son of a poor grocer and janitor, is demure, hardworking, blond. He worked as scorecard seller at the Chicago Cubs’ ball park, advertising art apprentice, broker’s clerk, printer’s paper-jogger. Without any of the intellectual and artistic pretensions of Schwartz, he has won four Institute prizes.

With wife and child he lives tidily over an old stable. He has just received a government commission for a mural in Vandalia, Ill.’s post office.

Chapin, an Art Institute favorite, has had much Chicago acclaim. His oils are forceful and suggestive, skimpy on detail, sometimes murky but always with one bright note of relief. His specialty is nudes. One on view last week showed a rear view of a woman changing a child’s diaper.

Born in Bristolville, Ohio, Chapin, 36, is a 6 ft. 5 in. flagpole of a man, bespectacled, long-necked, argumentative and ironic, who has a steady job teaching lithography at the Art Institute. Like the others, he is an inveterate prizewinner.

Besides these three, the Art Institute last week presented work by:

German Carl Hoeckner, 51, the Art Institute’s teacher of layout and interior decoration, who showed a series of huge, macabre canvases. Of them Hoeckner says: “They might be called my emotional records—first of the World War, then the Steel Age, the Jazz Age, the Depression and the general confusion throughout the world.”

Spaniard Julio de Diego, 35, who exhibited good-humored, satirical pictures.

Scot J. Jeffrey Grant, 52, commercial artist, who pleased and comforted with conventional Gloucester fishing smacks and street scenes.

Pole Walter Krawiec, who had circus scenes to which were added, for good measure, some of his wife’s still lifes of peonies and such.