Art: Death of Henri

As it must to all men, Death came last week to Robert Henri (pronounced Hen-Rye), 64, outstanding U. S. artist, sick since last autumn in St. Luke’s Hospital, Manhattan.

Robert Henri was not an elegant, sensational painter like the late John Singer Sargent, nor a trenchant controversialist like the late Joseph Pennell. Insurgent, he did not crusade. He taught instead. Born in Cincinnati of French-English-Irish descent, he studied at the Pennsylvania and Julien (Paris) Academies, at the Paris Beaux-Arts. French precision and orthodoxy never made him feel com fortable. Strolling the corridors of the Louvre, he revered Rembrandt, Velasquez, Hals, but was long unable to evolve con victions of his own. Like most fine artists, he remained, even after success, a student of the masters. “Put on a pair of false whiskers so you won’t be bothered,” he wrote. “I am thinking of a series of disguises for myself so that I can go to picture galleries and look . . . and think. . . .” Impressionism permanently affected him. His subjects were usually nobodies of all nationalities. From the age of 33, when the Luxem bourg purchased his cityscape La Neige, Artist Henri’s reputation vaulted, his tal ent ripened slowly, continuously. He taught in Philadelphia, Paris, New York. His later years were spent at Manhattan’s Art Students League, where hun dreds of students learned that this man with the sensitive Gallic features and wide-set, almost almond eyes, could stimu late their vision and would carefully avoid imposing his own or any particular technique. In his insistence on vision rather than style lay his greatness as a teacher. “Every stave in a picket fence,” he wrote, “should be drawn with wit, the wit of one who sees each stave as new evidence about the fence. The staves should not repeat each other. A new fence is stiff, but it doesn’t stand long before there is a movement through it, which is the trace of its life experience. The staves become notes, and as they differ the wonder of a common picket fence is revealed.” Artist Henri’s proteges included Rockwell Kent and the late great George Bellows. As he taught he learned, particularly from conversation with such friends as his colleagues in “The Eight” (Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Ernest Lawson, William J. Glackens, George Luks, the late Arthur B. Davies), a group which spurred the militant Society of Independent Artists and encouraged U. S. painting as such. Within a few hours of Artist Henri’s death, a Henri memorial association was formed at the artist colony of Santa Fe, N. Mex. Object: $2,000,000 to build in Manhattan a gallery such as Artist Henri had often dreamed of—devoted exclusively to U. S. painting.

Blue Boys

In 1778 Sir Josnua Reynolds weightily pronounced blue to be unsuitable as a prevailing color in paintings. Almost simultaneously Artist Thomas Gainsborough produced his famed Blue Boy, intentionally or not a complete confutation of haughty Artist Reynolds.

In 1782 Artist George Romney increased his fashionable and esthetic reputation by painting a Blue Boy, too. In 1789 he painted still another, a portrait of Scottish Poet-Scholar William Tennant at the age of five, for which Father Tennant paid $250. Both Romney portraits are supposed to have been part of a Blue Boy movement in which English artists were still thrusting at Artist Reynold’s dictum.

The second Romney Blue Boy, purchased last week for an undisclosed price by Manhattan’s Ehrich Galleries from Walter S. M. Burns of London, nephew of John Pierpont Morgan, will soon be sent to Manhattan. Thus two out of the three Blue Boys will be in the U. S. Gainsborough’s, purchased from Sir Joseph Duveen in 1921 for a reputed $650.000, is in the famed Huntingdon collection (San Marino, Cal.). The earliest Romney Blue Boy is in a private collection at By-fleet, England.

Licensing Architects

Law cannot compel architects to create Beauty. But it can insist that they create Safety—by requiring them to be examined in engineering principles. Yet states* still permit unexamined, unregistered, amateurish architects to design buildings which may well be unsafe. Last fortnight the American Institute of Architects issued a statement urging nationwide registration and examination laws. Excerpt: “It is a short-sighted policy to rest upon the condition that the architects in a certain state are doing good work and plenty of it, without registration, or for an architect to say that his talent is above the need for licensing. . . .”

* States which require no registration: Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Wyoming.