Art: Sidewalk of Chicago

Sidewalks of Chicago

Last June a young commercial artist staged Manhattan’s first sidewalk art show, where artists and buyers dickered face to face over sales (TIME, May 2, June 13). Last week Chicago’s artists swarmed into Grant Park, set their pictures on park benches or the ground and stood ready for buyers. Of the 200, able painters were Ivan Lorraine and Malvin Marr Albright, Mrs. Vivian Hoyt and Raymond Katz. In a welter of bad art, the artists were gay, buyers tolerant. Young buyers bought nudes, older ones “parlor pieces” of still life and landscape, totaling over $1,000 a day. Finally hoboes and Illinois Central commuters so jammed Grant Park that the park commissioners moved the artists oh” the grass onto the red-paved square in front of the Congress Hotel.

The show’s organizer was Miss Cati Mount, 24, brash enfante terrible of Chicago’s art world. A graduate of the Art Institute, she runs the Little Gallery in the old Auditorium Building. Last week she sat under a yellow umbrella, leaning on a cedar cane, showing red toenails through her pointed sandals, and snappily ran the show.

Little known is Chicago’s art colony. It is near the north side, centering around Rush Street. About 20 years ago, wealthy citizens began moving out of the old brick houses, and artists and writers began moving in. Best known arty rendezvous is the Dill Pickle Club where bushy-haired Dr. Ben L. Reitman. onetime lover of Emma Goldman, author of The Second Oldest Profession, lectures nightly on sex. The favorite artists’ restaurants are the Question Mark, the K-9 Club. Schlogel’s in the Loop, Ballantine’s on Rush Street and the Round Table in the basement of a butcher shop on Chicago Avenue. Since the great days when Poet Vachel Lindsay. Novelist Theodore Dreiser. Dramatist Ben Hecht, et al. worked in Chicago, Chicago’s Bohemia has declined.