Art: Manhattan Mahatma

For 20 years Manhattan’s most persistent exhibition-goer was a little old gentleman with a beard, a beady eye and baggy trousers. Standing before a painting, preferably a high-priced one, he would mutter. “Pffft! Such crude pigments! My, such a stencil technique—brr—let me get away!” He stopped other gallery-goers to tell them he was the world’s greatest artist, passed out handbills describing himself as “Mesmerist-Prophet and Mystic, Humorist Galore, Ex All Round Athletic Sportsman (to 1889), Scientist supreme: all ologies, Ex Fancy amateur Dancer. . . .” He wrote crank letters to the newspapers. His letterhead: “Mahatma Dr. Louis M. Eilshemius, M.A. etc., Mightiest Mind and Wonder of the Worlds, Supreme Parnassian and Grand Transcendant Eagle of Art.” His paintings, on the rare occasions he could get them shown, brought horse laughs from critics and public alike.

Last week Louis Eilshemius was again hailed as “the greatest living master”—this time by somebody else.* In three of Manhattan’s swank 57th Street galleries— Kleemann, Boyer, Valentine, he was being given simultaneous one-man shows. Another Eilshemius exhibition was touring the Pacific Coast; a fifth was about to be sent through the Middle West. In seven short years the Mahatma has turned from a crank to a cult. Manhattan’s sedate Metropolitan Museum has three of his canvases, and he is represented in virtually every important public and private art collection in the U. S.

Had the Mahatma protested less, the art world would almost certainly have accepted him sooner. Not until 1932 did dealers and critics pierce his smoke screen of self-publicity, discover that his naive, whimsical paintings were worthy of serious attention. For a song, dealers then snapped up his lush romantic landscapes, his pictures of Samoa, his moonlit fantasies, his strange nude “nymphs” bathing in improbable streams. These have since sold at high prices, while Eilshemius went in want. Last week his three Manhattan dealers agreed to cut him in on a percentage of future sales.

It has been many a day since the Mahatma has gone to an exhibition. At 75, he is a cripple confined to his second-story bedroom in a gloomy, gaslit brownstone house on 57th Street. Eilshemius persists in sitting with his back to the window, his face turned away from the light. He shrills at visitors: “It’s too late to enjoy my fame. I got bad legs.”

* AND HE SAT AMONG THE ASHES—William Schack—American Artists Group ($3)