Art: Resident Apostle

When the University of Wisconsin lured chubby, Kansas-born John Steuart Curry to lecture farm boys on painting, art rivalry among U. S. colleges began to burn with a hard, gemlike flame. Other up-&-coming schools promptly hired their own resident artists, not to teach art but to talk it, to paint while undergraduates gaped and to give an occasional steer to hopeful dedicates. To the University of Georgia went Native Son Lamar Dodd. Dartmouth called home its own Paul Sample. Muralist Thomas Benton spurned all Missouri compromises during four stormy years teaching and painting at Kansas City’s Art Institute. Frank Mechau Jr. was called this autumn to Columbia University.

Latest artist to move in on the campus is slight, baldish, bright-looking, tweedy Dale Nichols, 35. School begins for him this week at the University of Illinois, whose trustees, impressed because he won a $300 William Randolph Hearst prize at a Chicago Art Institute exhibit in 1935, because Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum bought and hung his End of the Hunt, because he is a two-fisted advocate of “beauty” v. “ugliness” in art, last summer appointed him for one year, first art apostle to the Illini under a five-year Carnegie Foundation grant.

Illinois’s new resident artist boasts: “I never had any training in the fine arts or painting, thank goodness!” A member of the Sanity in Art Group, which considers “modernist” a synonym for “lousy,” Artist Nichols is belligerent in refusing to “pick out the ugly things—strikes, droughts, ugly alleys and paint them.” Subjects he prefers are the prairie landscapes of his youth, usually snowed under. These famed smooth snow effects Artist Nichols gets by laying on his oils in a thin film with watercolor brushes.

With critics who compare his slick, sterilized landscapes to picture postcards, fan decorations and candy-box covers, Artist Nichols has long waged dubious battle through a stream of open letters. Sample Nichols rebuke: “I still maintain that your reference to my tempera looking ‘like a candy-box’ is unfair to designers in the graphic arts. . . . Had you said that my painting looked like a bad candy-box cover I would not have objected. . . .”

Profitably for Artist Nichols, the U. S. public backed his critics’ opinion by buying 48,000 postcard reproductions of his paintings in 1938.