Art: Underdog Lover

Though most people think they feel sympathy for human wretchedness, it is a remarkable fact that present-day proletarian paintings are in general formalized, strained and snide. Painters like the late George Luks and George Bellows could make an old applewoman look pathetic; young painters nowadays are more likely to make her look depraved. Somewhere between pathos and depravity lies the truth which would arouse fear and pity. For various reasons—preoccupation with design, premature austerity, honorable anger or plain bad draughtsmanship—few modern artists touch that particular truth.

This week, at the Hudson D. Walker Gallery in Manhattan, critics inspected the work of a young man from Baltimore who seemed to be getting warm. Mervin Jules, 25, does not yet wear the mantle of Daumier (see col. 3), but among his 20 tempera paintings and score of gouaches (opaque water colors) there were several which allowed spectators not only to see poverty but to see into it. Several others showed a spirit and skill at caricature which located Jules below but in line with Rivera, Orozco, Grosz and other effective satirists of social horrors.

Said John Sloan four years ago: “Painting . . . has been getting sicker and sicker for over 100 years. The ultra moderns will cure it.” Signs of such a cure were evident in devices of composition which Mervin Jules has apparently borrowed from trick photography and the fantastic school, used for his own purposes.

Art followers could also take pleasure in Artist Jules’s restrained, luminous color. Best pictures: Little Tailor, showing, through the huge foreground frame of a sewing machine, a pallid gnome bent over his stitching; Mine Baseball, in which the figures of the players are dark on a field yellow with late afternoon sunlight against a dark background of mine breakers and hills; Jury, whose procession of fat and lean brainless bourgeois figures directly recalled Daumier’s treatments of the same subject; The Liberals, which presents, out on a limb, the Scientist, the Man who Sees Both Sides, the Indecisive Man, the Scholar, the Hysterical Mystic, the Infantile Man, the Man who Waits for the Right Time, while red-bannered masses see the forward and underneath (see cut).

Mervin Jules was about 18 before he discovered he could draw. His family wanted him to be a cellist and for seven years he studied to be one. Then he got a scholarship to the Maryland Institute of Fine and Practical Arts, supported himself by waiting on customers in his uncle’s clothing store. In 1933 Manhattan’s Art Students’ League gave him a librarian’s job which paid for his tuition and he lived on $8.50 a week that winter, while working under Thomas Benton.

Back in Baltimore he worked part-time as a cutter in a men’s suit factory, helped organize the Artists’ Union. Blond, stocky, bespectacled Artist Jules came to Manhattan last July and clubbed with two artist friends to rent two big studio rooms in a gloomy building on lower Fifth Avenue. Jules does the cooking for all three. They own a rickety 1927 Chrysler, cannot afford a telephone.