Art: Hollywood to the Rescue

In the largest theatre in the world, the International Music Hall of Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, workmen with buckets of white lead were busy last week pasting up the world’s largest mural painting, a curved 60-by-40-ft. canvas by Ezra Winter, showing an old man gazing thoughtfully from a cliff at a procession of winged horses and muscular nudes swooping up into the sky. This picture is called “The Fountain of Youth.” Workmen have also just set up, in the ladies’ room of Rockefeller Center’s 3,500-seat cinema theatre, an illuminated colored glass panel 18 ft. long of “Amelia Earhart Crossing the Atlantic,” and in the main lounge another 18-ft. panel entitled “Sports,” by Arthur Crisp.

But none of Rockefeller Center’s murals startles the beholder quite so much as a large canvas hung this autumn in the spectacular foyer of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, entitled “Hollywood Comes to Napoleon’s Aid”. So lavish are the decoration and the crowds in Grauman’s Chinese that ordinary theatre-goers might pass this picture by. Last week it was called sharply to public attention by 20-year-old Sherman Miller, editor & publisher of California Youth. On a white charger Napoleon rides across a wheat field that seems to be exploding under his horse’s hoofs. Behind him is his staff, impersonated by some of Hollywood’s foremost impersonators. From left to right they are: Director Erich von Stroheim, with his shako cocked over his nose; Producer Joe Schenck as a colonel of the cuirassiers; Douglas Fairbanks of the Hussards de la Garde; Grenadier Clive Brook; le Maréchal Sid Grauman; Adolphe Menjou as Marshal Ney; William Powell as an aide de camp. To the left lies Groucho Marx as a dead trumpeter. In the lower right-hand corner Charlie Chaplin, as a drunken priest, is clutching a bottle of champagne and refusing a drink of brandy from Vivandière Marion Davies. In the background a staff officer is apparently trying to keep a charging regiment of cuirassiers (copied from Meissonier’s Friedland) from trampling the entire assemblage underfoot. Three years ago the picture was unveiled in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles by the mother of Theatre Owner Sid Grauman with the remark, “It is the work of genius.”

The genius is 19-year-old Charles de Ravenne, a retired child actor and self-taught painter. Artist de Ravenne was once described by the now defunct Hollywood Highlights as “a slight youngster with the ‘artiste’ expressed in every characteristic. His deep, ferret-black eyes look through you in search of what it is that combines to make you appear as you do. His broad understanding smile bespeaks an appreciation of you and God and nature. His long slinky fingers were made to push a brush.

“You wonder as you look at him and listen to him—is it so impossible that he be the Raphael reincarnate? For he tells you that his birthday falls on the same day, the same month as the Italian’s. . . . The horses in the Ravenne bear an, unmistakable likeness to Raphael’s.”

Directly beneath Curé Chaplin’s left boot Artist Ravenne has noted the fact that his masterpiece was begun Feb. 26, 1929, finished June 8. Impresario Sid Grauman values it at $25,000.