Art: History of Commerce

Last week friends of the artist were permitted to see in Manhattan nine of a series of ten new murals by Boardman Robinson for department-store tycoon Edgar Kaufmann of Pittsburgh.

Three years ago, Edgar Kaufmann, on culture bent, decided to remodel his store. He scoured the U. S. for a good draughtsman, found Boardman Robinson, painter-cartoonist, asked him for a set of murals expressing the history of commerce. Some years before, Artist Robinson had concluded that the only excuse for painting was to subserve architecture and had applied himself to that problem. Delightedly he accepted the commission, but reserved the right to be his own master at all times, to make his own designs, be left alone. Mr. Kaufmann agreed.

Artist Robinson first concerned himself with medium—what to paint with, what on. He decided on canvas because he could then work anywhere and the murals, when finished, could be easily moved about. He then asked himself what paint had had the benefit of most research and chemical improvement. Obviously, automobile-paint. He hired a workshop, made sketches in pen, pencil, paint. Models of every race and color trooped in and out. The better to understand three-dimensional space he first modelled his groups so that he could look down upon their heads and look behind them to find what masses would organize best, what planes intersect. Then he loaded his big brush with auto-paint and started to work.

Painter Robinson’s murals are each about 15 ft. x 8 ft. Beginning with an animated commercial squabble between the Persians and the Arabs, they progress to Carthaginians in the Mediterranean striking a crafty bargain with the Egyptians. Venetians in the Levant when bartering was done with benefit of clergy so that polite thieving was sanctified. Subsequently they show the Portuguese in India, the Dutch in the Baltic, the English in China, slave traders and clipper ships in the 19th Century U. S.* The last is a generalized scene of modern industry— liners in a harbor, airplanes in the air, tall buildings rearing in the background, a sweating structural steel crew. Each unit is related to the whole by composition and color. There are no pretty girls, no idealization, no gold leaf.

Painter Robinson was born in Nova Scotia in 1876, son of a sea-captain and a farmer’s daughter. He has studied in Paris, practiced in the U. S. for 30 years (newspaper cartoons, stained glass windows, smartchart layouts for Vogue, oils of every description). Large and athletic, with a greying red beard, a monkish bald spot, he likes modern French painting less than modern Mexican painting. When Mexican Diego Rivera’s paintings (TIME, May 6) were first hung, seven people were shot. Says Robinson: “I’d be glad if someone stepped on a policeman’s toe when I show mine.”

*The ninth, a companion mural, is incomplete.