Art: Simple Things

Sixty-two-year-old Artist Leon Dabo is well known to the older art-critics and active women’s club members of the U. S. Before the War he was ubiquitous; his paintings were bought by such museums as the Luxembourg at Paris, the Imperial at Tokyo, the National at Ottawa, the National at Washington, the Metropolitan at Manhattan, the Fine Arts at Boston. He was acquainted with the great & famed everywhere. Since the War he has been shy about his paintings but bold about his conviction that while U. S. men are growing more material-minded, their women may save the race for Art by becoming more spiritual. Result: he has averaged 15 lectures per month to U. S. women’s clubs, with such success that recently he had to decline invitations to deliver 30 per month more. Last week he reassumed his pre-War personality, gave a one-man painter’s show in Manhattan. Leon Dabo was born at Detroit, Mich, into a French-Canadian family, spoke “Canuck” French in his youth. Aged 16 he went to Manhattan to study under the late famed John LaFarge, who later sent him to Puvis de Chavannes in France. That artist enrolled him in the Academie Julian, added his own instruction afterwards. Whistler was his final master. Then Leon Dabo set out to range the world, meeting celebrities and learning languages—acquiring, incidentally, a love of the sea, which became his favorite theme. He knows Asia, the Near East, Africa. He spent 1904 in Greece. In France before the War he met Georges Clemenceau at the studio of Claude Monet. In 1914 he offered his polylinguistic services to the Tiger. He served as an officer in the French, British and U. S. Armies successively. Especially adept was he at detecting whether or not a man’s dialect in any languagecorresponded to the town he purported to be from; by this means he exposed many a German spy, sent him out to be shot. Once acting the spy himself, he was dropped from an airplane behind the German lines, gained his information and escaped. Leon Dabo thoroughly enjoyed the War. Dabo seascapes are not Nature as the ordinary man sees it. They are all alike in treatment, grey predominating, as in subject—beach, sea and sky. Artist Dabo retained well what he learned of composition from Whistler, of color from Puvis de Chavannes. His almost academic rendering and semi-symbolism date him definitely as of their time. For his simplicity and haziness of detail there is further explanation. He has delved deep into occult literature, emerged with a great faith in the Simple Things of Life. Last week a fellow-believer, the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, cousin of the late Tsar Nicholas, dropped into the exhibition and interrupted Artist Dabo’s explanation of his works for an involved discussion of these Simple Things.