Art: Wives

¶ In a neatly made-over barn overlooking the Hudson River at Croton. N. Y., live merry Trotskyist Max Eastman (Enjoyment of Laughter) and his husky Russian wife, Eliena Krylenko. whose brother is a Stalinist.* While white-maned Mr. Eastman works at his witty scribbles, blonde Mrs. Eastman teaches dancing, paints. After studying in Moscow, in Paris and under Manhattan’s Jean Charlot, she has done capable portraits of most of her friends except her husband, whom she thinks she has yet to paint successfully.

Last spring a Negro housepainter named Offie Edward Cherry, laying a coat of fresh white paint over the Eastman house, got Mrs. Eastman interested in painting walls. First wall she found to work on was in Charlie Briaur’s bar in Ossining for which she did a gay little scene of a country beer garden with Negro and white drinkers at the tables, Negro and white children dancing or shooting craps. Second job undertaken was the wall on each side of the altar in Ossining’s Star of Bethlehem Negro Baptist Church. Proud of his protegee, Offie Edward Cherry nailed up scaffolding for her and she started to work last June.

Last week many a white guest joined the Star of Bethlehem’s black congregation at the unveiling of Mrs. Eastman’s Sermon on the Mount and Crucifixion, done in oil on pressed wood. So delighted were they all with the artist’s vivid orange, green, lavender, purple, red and yellow figures, pretty Galilean hills and jagged Calvary that a collection for her was taken up forthwith, netting $64.26.

¶ Manhattan art critics were surprised twice in quick succession last week: 1 ) when the swank Knoedler Galleries opened their season with an exhibition of 21 flower paintings by the wife of a Hollywood producer. and 2) when the paintings turned out to be not so bad. Mrs. Bessie Lasky is the wife of Mr. Jesse Lasky. Slender, pale, serene, with curly Titian hair and a love of Chinese pajamas, she has been painting ever since the Laskys became prosperous about 15 years ago. Of her subjects she says: “I understand flowers better than anything else. To me they are human—as human as people.” Also much to her liking as subjects are the lovely bowls, beautiful pieces of glassware, the exquisite Ming pottery which she collects. From soft sofas she toys with romantic notions of Greenwich Village inspiration, clinging to the belief that art is born in discontent. “It seems to me,” Artist Lasky has been quoted, ”that I could paint better, write better poetry, if I had to struggle to do it.” To which Hollywood Producer Lasky replies: ”Don’t kid yourself, little girl.”

* Soviet Commissar for Justice Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko.