Art: Peirce Show

An impulse put Waldo Peirce on a cattle boat with his Harvard friend John Reed in 1911, and a later impulse sent him overside with a splash to swim back to Boston in what has become a classic change of heart. Huge, flat-nosed, bearded Painter Peirce. now 52, is still unpredictablethough married for the third time and the father of twins. In Bangor, Me., last week he went out fishing while Manhattan’s Midtown Galleries waited feverishly for new paintings to include in its “retrospective” exhibition of Peirces, to run through September.

One of the few happy Bohemians now extant, Waldo Peirce drove an ambulance in France in 1915. traveled in Spain with Ernest Hemingway before The Sun Also Rises, lived and roistered in Madrid, Paris, Tunis. Like most artists who came out of the War with minds touched by mortality and repelled by stuffiness, he stayed in Europe until Depression called him home. His painting first went strongly Zuloaga, then Goya, then strongly Matisse, remains humorous and unruly. In the past few years his favorite subjects have been his twins, Michael and Chamberlain, and their more recent sister, Gabby. He once whiled away a short vacation in Key West by painting a pious mural for a convent where the twins had been boarding, then turning around to do a mural of captured sharks for Sloppy Joe’s bar.

Among watercolors promised for the present show was an exuberant sketch of Old Friends Hemingway and Max Eastman in their recent bosom-baring scuffle (TIME, Aug. 23). At the last minute Painter Peirce changed his mind, dropped The Foibles of Fisticuffs from his list. On view this week, however, are new paintings of circuses and county fairs, bright canvases done at Key West, two views of the Harvard Tercentenary celebrations at Cambridge last year, charming paintings of the children. Critics detected a deepening in his work, belying one of the numerous Peirce ballads which runs:

. . . it aint no use

To be really aesthetic

If the painter hisself

Aint a little pathetic

An’ our bard o’Bangwhor*

He led too many lives

An’ had too many wenches

An’ too many wives

He had too many vittles

An’ too much licker

An’ too many homesteads

In France an’ Africker. . . .

*He means Bangor, Me.