Art: Animal Week

Last week, the 65th of World War II, the U. S. art world seemed to find a new interest in life. Unable to face man’s inhumanity to man, artists and gallerygoers agreed that war was the time to concentrate on good clean animals. In Manhattan what began as a coincidence seemed turning into a circus parade for escapists. Items:

> Fortnight ago Manhattan’s Buchholz Gallery opened the first U. S. one-man show of a long-dead Munich painter named Franz Marc. Just before the outbreak of World War I, sad-eyed Franz Marc became disgusted with human beings, decided to spend the rest of his life painting animals. He painted pink and blue horses prancing in quiet landscapes, garish dogs, tigers, monkeys, cows and deer. Germans regarded him as one of the topflight painters of his period. When Painter Marc was mustered off to war, even his animal world seemed too close to the savage world of reality. From the Western Front he wrote his wife: “Early in my life I found man ugly and animals seemed to me lovelier and purer; but even in them I discovered so much conflict and feeling and such ugliness that instinctively, from inner necessity, my representations became even more schematic and abstract.” Shortly afterward, under the guns of Verdun, Franz Marc was killed. Last week U. S. gallerygoers found his soft, poetically gloomy animal scenes a welcome diversion from the hullabaloo of World War II.

> Taking up the cue, The Bronx Zoo opened an exhibition of animal paintings by Joel Stolper, who for the past 15 years has been peering behind the bars of cages, writing and illustrating books on giraffes and other animals. Ex-Prize Fighter Stolper, who fought all over the U. S. as a lightweight under the alias Joe Stone, had also been converted to animal painting through his disgust for human violence. Said he : “I looked around the dressing room at the other boxers and for the first time I really saw their broken noses and cauliflower ears, and noticed how some of them were permanently groggy. Right then I decided I was through with boxing. I had always wanted to be an artist any way. . . .”

> Biggest animal art show last week was put on by the dignified, Victorian-upholstered Pierpont Morgan Library, which elbows Manhattan’s midtown skyscrapers like a Brewster barouche in a traffic jam of taxis. Said a high-nosed Morgan Library attendant: “I suppose it’s a very good idea, at a time when human beings are acting so savagely, to show records of the behavior of animals.” From its richly laden shelves, librarians had taken down the Morgan Library’s best 9th to 19th-Century bestiaries, travel books, mythologies, collected fables, lives of animal-loving saints, set their animal pictures under glass for the public. Daniels and St. Jeromes fondled lions in their dens, St. Georges slew dragons by the lanceful; behemoths, leviathans out of Job and seven-headed monsters out of Revelations reared and pranced on many an ancient parchment. An old Flemish manuscript showed St. Margaret being disgorged Caesarean-wise by a repentant dragon who had swallowed her. A fox ogled out-of-reach grapes in the earliest extant copy of Aesop (circa 1000 A.D.). A 15th-Century German volume showed a woodcut of bewildered apes trying to light a fire with the aid of a glow worm (see cut), while birds jeered from a tree.

> Manhattan’s conservative Knoedler Gallery gave its second floor over to animal Society. The Society portraitist was pretty, petite, 28-year-old June Harrah, who sculps likenesses of champion dogs and race horses for the doggy and horsy set. Sculptress Harrah’s deft statuettes (of such equestrian nobility as Seabiscuit, Challedon and Jadaan, the grey stallion ridden by the late Rudolph Valentino in The Son of the Sheik) excited horse-& dog-lovers, also brought high marks from many a high-brow art critic. Daughter of a gentleman rancher who founded the town of Harrah, Wash., June Harrah also likes animals better than people, rates the race-tracky smell of Absorbine Jr. (used to rub down horses) higher than My Sin. Because well-heeled horse and dog owners like to have portraits of their pets on their mantelpieces, Sculptress Harrah charges much higher prices than the average bookend and paper weight animal sculptor, gets $200 for a bronze dog, $700 up for a bronze horse. For four years June Harrah has supported herself with her sculpture. She was educated at a swank finishing school, never had any systematic training in art, knows nothing about the work of other sculptors past or present. Says she: “I don’t get around much in art; I just do it because I have to.”