Art: High-Brow Publicity

If a Hollywood producer can be considered highbrow, suave, grey-eyed Walter Wanger is it. Two months ago, when he was working on an ambitious picture called The Long Voyage Home (based on Eugene O’Neill’s Moon of the Caribbees, and Other Plays of the Sea), Producer Wanger decided to show Hollywood and the world a new high in artistic publicity. With the help of smart Manhattan Gallery Director Reeves Lewenthal, he hired nine of the best U. S. painters he could get to go to Hollywood and paint real high-brow pictures of scenes from the movie (TIME, June 10). The stunt cost Producer Wanger $50,000, left him the owner of enough good contemporary U. S. art (twelve canvases) to put him into the running as one of Hollywood’s leading collectors.

Last week Producer Wanger exhibited his $50,000 worth of art in Manhattan, invited the public to the Associated American Artists’ Gallery to take a look. In the show’s first two hours, attracted by personalities as well as art, 1,132 milling gallery-goers gave the Associated American Artists’ Gallery an all-time attendance record.

Three of Producer Wanger’s artists (George Biddle, Ernest Fiene, Robert Philipp) had painted straight, conventional portraits of costumed cinemactors. One (Fiene) had thrown in a portrait of Producer Wanger himself. Famed U. S. “Primitive” Grant Wood, who sees life steadily and sees it neat, had painted a barbershop septet in a bar so photographically that it might have been mistaken for a movie still. Spanish Frescoist Luis Quintanilla had concentrated on the women in the cast (Carmen Morales and Judith Linden), left the two-fisted action scenes for Thomas Benton, Raphael Soyer, Georges Schreiber and James Chapin.

Most clucked-over exhibit, which went a long way toward explaining why Thomas Benton’s bent-figured painting looks the way it does, was a small model in plastilene and hairpins, from which he painted his oily-looking scene of sailors refusing to board ship. Asked about it, Painter Benton said it was nothing new, that he had been painting all his pictures from plastilene casts for the past 21 years, that he learned the trick from Leonardo da Vinci.

Scheduled for a tour of U. S. museums, Producer Wanger’s experiment in cultural publicity had by last week got so much attention for The Long Voyage Home that he counted his $50,000 well spent. Meanwhile another Hollywood studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was nosing around picture galleries, wondering whether it shouldn’t commission some paintings too. Said Producer Wanger, gravely posing for the press photographers: “It’s all for the sake of art.”