Arts: Three Painters

Three painters, each of whom has made a precise, individual contribution to the U. S. Art of this day, exhibited, last week, in Manhattan. The public viewed with respect the works of Painters Daniel Garber, Nichola Fechin, and A. H. Garson.

Daniel Garber is essentially a painter of countrysides−gentle and spacious landscapes touched with the glamor of an April reticence, the regretful mists of fading summer, old houses, lanes, bridges, windless leaves enchanting a forest avenue. He paints on a toned canvas with a short stroke, a small brush. Shining spots of canvas show through the paint. Notable is his portrait of a girl in blue mending her underwear out-of-doors in the ripple and shadow of sunlight and uneasy willow branches. Yet for all this iridescent preciosity, there is solidity of grouping, vigorous draughtmanship, broad effects of mass.

Nicola Fechin has painted various things, among them two fried eggs. Yellow as Tuscan florins, complacent, succulent, they swim in the glory that is grease; worshippers, gazing upon them in the Grand Central Galleries, thought of the famed eggs of history−of Humpty-Dumpty, of the egg of Columbus, even of the fabulous, the cosmic, Egg. For this is the magic of Artist Fechin. He is a superb technician. His command of brushing, of absolute color, is masterly. He deceives the eye, some-times for a minute at a time, into mistaking for a great painting a work which is in reality “no more creative than a virtuoso’s playing of a Chopin minuet.”

A. H. Garson lives in Pittsburgh; he paints his city. Painter Garson has listened to many factory whistles; he has seen, morning after morning, night after night, the black smoke from a thousand chimneys besmut the sky. The grim force that animates this activity of whistles, furnaces, chimneys, smoke awes and angers him; its meaning, if it has any, eludes, and he gropes for it o blazing, sultry canvases.