ART: Red Bridge

From 178th Street in New York City the mightiest of suspension bridges is being built, across the Hudson River. Its span will be 3,500 feet, its weight 90,000 tons, its cost $60,000,000. Like mechanistic titans, its two towers will stand 635 feet above the river.* Last week they had risen more than 450 feet, were visible for miles around. They shone with the preliminary coat of bright red paint which is applied to most steel structures.† An artist named McClelland Barclay saw the glowing towers of the Hudson bridge. He was inspired. “The new bridge,” said he to a friendly newsman, “is the most gorgeously beautiful sight that can be found in New York. … If the builders . . . paint the bridge black it will be scarcely visible. … It will lose all its gleaming beauty. It will be humdrum and ugly. Now, when the sun sets, the red bridge is glorified into burning scarlet. When the storm clouds gather, the red gleams through the threatening darkness in unequalled splendor. Rising beyond the solid green of Central Park, the gorgeousness of the rich red hue is heightened.” Artist Barclay, apostle of scarlet magnitudes, is not so famed as a John Singer Sargent or a Joseph Pennell. But more millions of magazine readers have seen his work than most painters can boast. He “does” the advertisements for Fisher Bodies, Humming Bird Hosiery, Texaco Gas; cover designs for Life, College Humor, Pictorial Review, Country Gentleman. For the shapely, aristocratic, painted heroines of Fisher Body (TIME, Dec. 24, et ante} Artist Barclay receives $1200 each. *1st George Jay (died 1923), 2nd Edwin, 3rd Helen (now Mrs. Finlay J. Shepard, mother of four adopted children), 4th Howard, 6th Anna (Countess Boni de Castellane from 1895 to 1905, but now Princesse de Sagan and Duchesse de Talleyrand. Count Boni de Castellane, who has not yet obtained a Roman Catholic annulment and therefore cannot marry again, is a famed disconsolate character in Paris, where he lives with a famed bull dog.

*Higher than all but two Manhattan skyscrapers; the Woolworth Building (792 ft.); the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building (700 ft . ) . †To keep away air, prevent rust. Such paint is an economical product of so-called red lead (minium, Ph.O).