Art: U. S. Etching v. British

Certain British print dealers gasped with astonishment and dismay last week when they received back from three Manhattan art establishments several unopened packages of prints by noted artists. Other such shipments had been similarly returned of late, and now members of the Print Sellers’ Association of Great Britain realize two things: i) They cannot outsmart the U. S. print-dealers; 2) U. S. print-lovers have grown so appreciative of the work of their fellow countrymen that U. S. dealers can be independent of British, if not of all foreign artists, in black-and-whites.

A large factor in the value of any etching is the number of impressions made, i. e. the size of the edition.* Unethical jobbers abroad have been sending to the U. S. work by famed etchers, with the statement that no further proofs were to be had, the issues being closed, and quoting specific prices. But after the prints were placed on sale, the British dealers would send agents to collectors in various parts of the U. S. and offer prints of their “closed” issues at less than the U. S. retail prices. Naturally, the collectors thought they were being overcharged by U. S. dealers.

A decade or so ago outraged U. S. dealers would probably have been more deliberate in declaring war and returning work by Sir David Young Cameron, Muirhead Bone, Edmund Blampied and other notables. But the demand for native work has increased several hundred per cent in the last dozen years, and with the demand has grown the number and fame of U. S. etchers. British prices are still the highest: a Cameron has sold for $4.000, whereas $1,125 Paid at an auction for Frank Weston Benson’s Pintails is still the U. S. record. But few prints, abroad or in the U. S., sell for more than $100 and the majority bring less than $50 at the time of issue. “Prices subject to change without notice” was the announcement on a catalog of a recent large Manhattan exhibition, indicating the speculative spirit which is driving U. S. prices upward.

A leading Manhattan gallery exhibited at one time in the summer of 1928 the work of 69 etchers. Last summer it showed prints by 100. That foreign connoisseurs are recognizing U. S. etchers was shown when, in 1928. the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris exhibited U. S. prints. Last spring the Victoria and Albert Museum, under the patronage of British Ambassador to Washington Sir Esme Howard, held an even larger show of the same kind.

Any well-rounded collection of U. S. etchings would include work by:

Frank Weston Benson of Salem, Mass. He was a painter for 30 years before he began etching, and won enough medals to satisfy a grand vizier. He was one of “The Ten Americans” who made artistic history a decade or more ago; his paintings as well as his prints are in many museums. His etchings indicate his favorite pastime —hunting and sketching wildfowl in lonely marshes. They bring higher prices than those of any living U. S. artist. A recent exhibition catalog, stating the prices of other etchers’ works, tactfully omitted mention of Benson’s prices, but the initial offer must be $150 or better.

John Taylor Arms of Fairfield, Conn., likes to travel abroad. His series on the lacy Gothic cathedrals of France is now worth about $150 per print. He is represented in many a museum, including the British and the Musee de Rouen.

Levon West, born in South Dakota 30 years ago, is a descendant of Benjamin West, Colonial and British painter. He likes to wander amid the lonely buttes and lakes of the Northwest, hunting and sketching, when he is not doing Houdini tricks with cards or taking rabbits out of the pockets of his friends. He watched the aviators on Long Island preparing for the flight to Paris in the spring of 1927. He came to know Charles Augustus Lind bergh, and etched his portrait directly on copper plate from memory, aided by a photograph, the day Lindbergh landed in Paris. Exhibited in Manhattan while Paris was still cheering, that bit of work did much to establish West. The impressions are now worth about $100 each.

Walter Ernest Tittle of Manhattan may have etched more notables than any artist now living. One of his series comprised all the principals in the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1922. So much has he lived abroad (he is a connoisseur of fine wines) that he was once interviewed as “Walter Tittle, the English etcher,” but he was born in Springfield, Ohio.

Louis C. Rosenberg of Manhattan finds pleasure wandering about Rome and Constantinople, doing stately ruins, picturesque mosques. Good Rosenbergs now fetch more than $70 each. He is represented in the British and Victoria & Albert Museums, London, besides various U. S. museums.

Martin Lewis of Manhattan combines humor and beauty in etching characters at beaches, on roof gardens, in city streets. He was born in Australia, and left home at an early age because his family objected to his “wasting his time making pictures.”

Troy Kinney of Manhattan whose specialty is the dance, finds his chief recreation during the outdoor season at his country place near New Canaan, Conn., where dancers pose and pirouette for him with only Nature’s scenery, personal or otherwise.

Sears Gallagher of Boston likes golfing and fishing in New England and elsewhere.

Versatile Childe Hassam enjoys beach scenes and many other things. It would require a half-column to list the prizes he has won, beginning with a bronze medal at the Paris Exposition of 1892, and the museums in which he is represented.

Kerr Eby prefers to wander amid wild marshes, fish in the surf. He was born in Tokyo of U. S. parents. He lives in Manhattan and Westport, Conn.

Thomas Schofield Handforth of Tacoma, Wash., and George Overbury (“Pop”) Hart of Coytesville, N. J., and many other places, have the greatest wanderlust of all. Handforth’s delight is to sketch shepherds in Arabia and scenes in Tunis; Hart’s to watch and sketch cockfights, mandolin players in Mexico and the West Indies, veiled women in Morocco.

Horace Demit Welsh of Philadelphia and Manhattan finds everything in life interesting, even people who know nothing about art. He has etched and painted subjects ranging from graveyards and inmates of insane asylums to night-club habitues. He is as much of an authority on Joseph Pennell as Pennell was on Whistler.

Arthur William Heintzleman of Manhattan and Paris, born in 1891 at Newark, N. J., has made a great success as painter and etcher, is represented in foreign and U. S. museums. He often travels in France and elsewhere with John Taylor Arms. His etchings bring $150 to $250 each.

“Perfect Masterpiece”

When he was in the U. S. five years ago Spain’s famed Painter Ignacio Zuloaga pointed to the art of the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Incas, saying: “That should be the source of the greatest inspiration to your artists. Leave European art to the Europeans, and develop a native art that will be truly American.”

Last week Jacques Mauny, French painter and critic, whose exhibition at the De Hauke Gallery (Manhattan) has just closed, said practically the same thing: “The collections of early American art at the Brooklyn Natural History and American Indian Museums are truly formidable. Let us hope that Americans will soon liberate themselves from the dictatorship of Europe—cease to be incurable addicts of the copie d’anden. Architects and artists must some time realize the value of their aboriginal art, native flower of the American continent, and the only one which was created for its crystal-like sky, just as Gothic art was the flower created for the damp and delicate scenery of Ile-de-France.”

Frenchman Mauny also took occasion to say: “The masses, however, do not seem to have too much need for art—in their old forms, at any rate. Perhaps the rhythm of their life is too brutal. Perhaps the American woman, a perfect living masterpiece, dispenses all the beauty needed for the country.”

Citadel Taken

U. S. modernists rejoiced and made merry last week. With the opening of a great exhibition at the Grand Central Galleries, Manhattan, they had captured one of the strongest citadels of conservatism. Never before had a modernist show been permitted there, and now the works of 33 modernists were on view. They celebrated artistically, mentally, physically, at the private view the day before opening. They danced to the music of mandolins and guitars in the dignified Grand Central premises. They drank tea and other liquids. They smoked cigarets in modernist defiance of signs that read “No Smoking.” Some of them ranged themselves earnestly around “Egg Beater No 5,” a thoroughly modernistic creation by Modernist Stuart Davis, and had their photograph taken. It was the biggest event in the campaign to modernize U. S. art since the Armory Show of 1913, in which several of the same artists were represented. Now the modernists were and are in control of the situation. Of the 33 exhibitors at the Grand Central show, 25 have pictures hanging in leading museums. On the first day of the show there were eleven sales.

The Painters and Sculptors Gallery Association, proprietors of the big showrooms above Grand Central station, has hitherto specialized in the work of academicians like George de Forest Brush, Herbert Adams, Edwin Howland Blashfield. This year they invited the Downtown Gallery, protagonist of modernism, to arrange a show. The exhibits, totalling 132 paintings, water colors, drawings, prints, sculptures, filled seven of the eleven galleries, will remain until the middle of February. The exhibitors:

George C. Ault, Peggy Bacon, Emile Branchard, Alexander Brook, Glenn 0. Coleman, Stuart Davis, Hunt Diederich, Duncan Ferguson, Ernest Fiene, Arnold Friedman, Wood Gaylor, Anne Goldthwaite, Bernar Gussow, Samuel Halpert, George O. (“Pop”) Hart, Stefan Hirsch, Morris Kantor, Bernard Karfiol, Walt Kuhn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Richard Lahey, Robert Laurent, Louis Lozowick, Reuben Nakian, Jules Pascin, Joseph Pollet, Ben Shahn, Charles Sheeler, Dorothy Varian, A. Walkowitz, Max Weber, Marguerite and William Zorach.

Washington and Philadelphia beat New York by several years in establishing modern museums, and the art institutions of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Brooklyn, Rochester, Denver, Worcester, Los Angeles and Newark all have large sections devoted to modernist art. Manhattan’s firs’; modernist museum, called the Gallery of Living Art, was opened two years ago by New York University in Washington Square, financed by Albert Eugene Gallatin. Three months ago New York’s second museum of the kind, The Museum of Modern Art, was established in the Heckscher Building, and when the name of Mrs. John Davison Rockefeller Jr. and others of financial and social eminence appeared among the sponsors, anyone could see the handwriting on the wall: wealth is supporting radical art. Last month Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney announced plans for Manhattan’s third museum of living art, to contain only U. S. works (TIME, Jan. 20), and last week it could definitely be told that, despite Mrs. Whitney’s personal predilection for the traditional, here too modernists will be welcomed.

As far west as California, and in towns as small as Springville, Utah, are associations showing modernist art. The attendance at the opening of the Museum of Modern Art show of Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh and Seurat, was 47,000. Neither art lovers nor the curious visit displays of academic art in such crowds. Cynics say that even the National Academy of Design, the very last and as yet uncaptured citadel of conservatism, had to hang a picture sidewise and then publicize the fact that a somewhat modernistic picture had been so hung by mistake (TIME, Nov. 18), to get people to attend its latest show.

* The etched plate wears out after 75 or 100 proofs have been “pulled.” Last week Director Charles L. Offin of The Etchers’ Guild warned the public against mechanically reproduced facsimiles now sold in drug stores for $1 each.