Art: Penitentiary Art

Art takes time. Convicts have lots of time. Last week in Clinton Prison at Dannemora, N. Y., and in the McAlester. Okla. Penitentiary, convicts had turned artist. At grey, feudal Clinton where in 1929 the inmates rioted (TIME, Aug. 5, 1929), Convict Peter J. Curtis, onetime Brooklyn sign painter, was holding art classes. From 9 to 10 a.m. he taught his colleagues lettering; from 10 to 11, figure composition; from 11 to 11:30, color mixing and color schemes; from 2 to 3 p.m., perspective, “style and individuality”; from 3 to 3:30, color harmony. In his free time he painted genre subjects: A Pinch of Snuff, showing an old shoemaker; Flemish Fisher, etc. etc. His students, avoiding life studies, copied hunting dogs from calendars, men on horseback from photographs, pictures of beautiful women.

In the McAlester Penitentiary is an old man whose paintings hang in several offices of the Oklahoma State Capitol, in the prison mess hall and the warden’s house. In 1898 Charles Matthew Conrad Maass suspected his wife of putting poison in his breakfast pork and sauerkraut. He fired three charges of buckshot into her. In his 33 years in jail he has painted hundreds of pictures, sold not one. Like Dannemora’s artists, he too copies his pictures, sometimes from memory. Called the Mad Artist, he is irrational except for his ability to copy pictures. His subjects include a Resurrection of Christ, a portrait of President Harding and Gains-borough’s Blue Boy.

Blankly jabbering, the toothless, paunchy old man, 66, with closecropped hair, beady blue eyes, steelrimmed spectacles tied behind his bullet head, shuffles in carpet slippers every morning to the trusty building for breakfast, shuffles back to his studio in an old mule barn to work. He refuses to appear before the clemency board for a pardon. Summoned, he stops jabbering long enough to say he is better off in jail.