Art: Immortal Dempsey

Jack Dempsey, heavyweight boxing champion, has broken the charmed circle of Culture. A portrait of the pugilist by Alonzo V. Lewis, of Seattle, hangs in an exhibition of Western art at the Kansas City Art Institute, between a Spring Landscape and Indian Summer. The director of the Institute is in two minds about it. His first emotion was that “art was being degraded”; his second that “boxing is a man’s game and a natural occupation ” and therefore presumably as worthy of perpetuation in oil as any other slice of life. There is ample precedent; the Luxembourg has for several years contained a portrait of silk-hatted Jim Jeffries, called The Champion, by Charles Dana Gibson, and George Bellows has done an eerie pointing of boxers actually in the ring. Lewis values his painting at $2,000.