Art: Independence Days

At the Waldorf Astoria, monumental Manhattan hotel, celebrated for its dignity and its cuisine, there was seen last week the annual exhibition of pictures fostered by the Society of Independent Artists, who are notorious for their lack of dignity, their poor taste, and the total inexclusiveness of their membership. But the Independent Artists shows are noted also for their originality and the excitement they cause among untutored art patrons. The exhibition is often referred to as a “circus” or a “rodeo” by such stubbornly facetious reporters as are sent, instead of art critics, to report the affair for newspapers. To exhibit an object of art under the auspices of this nonjury, non-prize-awarding organization, it is only necessary that the manufacturer of the object pay $8 to cover, presumably, the rent of wall-space. Hence many absurd trophies of the endless hunt for ideas are hung along the Waldorf wainscots and many able artists also, who quite naturally dislike submitting their efforts to unsympathetic juries, send excellent work to this strange and gaudy salon.

This year, as usual, the show came in like a mad March lion. It was noted that two themes had preoccupied the attention of many of the most absurd artists; one was Death, the other was Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh. Novel materials for expressing alleged thoughts were few in number; the most noteworthy was a three dimensional drawing, or skeleton sculpture, of a she-wolf giving suck to two small boys. The lines of the she-wolf’s body were indicated in copper wire; her mammary glands were represented by door stops. Of the other exhibits a few may be briefly described as follows:

Soul, by Muriel Haskell, is an entirely ludicrous pattern, attempting to present, in its melee of prongs and beams and curlycues, an allegory as trite, as uninteresting and as unconvincing as the metaphors in a schoolboy’s sonnet.

Navesink Lights, by Adelaide Morris, is a shiny landscape, containing a bathing pavilion, bridge, hill, road, river, castle, and autocar, cleverly executed in the suave and polished “naïve” manner, now vastly popular in Germany.

President Calles, by Luis Hidalgo, famed Mexican caricaturist, was a most grossly insulting and funny portrait of this famed statesman. Hidalgo’s faunlike Lindy showed the aviator riding a ridiculous horse around the world.

Ferdinand Cartier drew a pen and ink picture of the Rockefeller Institute, in Manhattan. There was nothing very remarkable about his drawing, except that it was composed of more than 500,000 minute pen lines.

John Sloan, Robert Henri, James Montgomery Flagg, famed all of them for worthy and comparatively orthodox works, the latter for his flashy magazine illustrations, allowed themselves to be represented among the Independents.

In Riverside Drive, Kikuta Nakagawa, one of the many Japanese artists who display their jocose and oriental sneers in the Independents’ salon, neatly portrayed a grotesque fat woman walking on the path and leading by the hand a little child who was, one could presume, one of many.

The worst paintings of all were those of Arthur Weindorf. An inept draughtsman and a stupid punster, he displayed a pair of pictures, one labelled The Eugenic Kid, the other, with blood-curdling imbecility, The Gin-Hic Kid. This last was a bad sketch of a girl’s legs and a gin bottle, all resting on a night-club table.