Art: Hollywood Headman

Hollywood Headsman

Three times in the last four years Hollywood’s popular Painter John Decker has turned from screwball to serious art. Artist Decker’s latest and most successful turning took place last fortnight over rum cocktails in Beverly Hills’ Little Gallery. Said Los Angeles Museum Director Roland McKinney: “I would say [Decker] has become one of the significant contemporary American painters.”

Decker’s show consisted of 16 eclectically painted portraits, landscapes, character studies. (Habitually, Decker paintings look as if they had been done by somebody else: Van Gogh, Rouault, Utrillo, Toulouse-Lautrec, Daumier.) Said Painter Decker of this parodistic paroxysm: “I have no style because I don’t believe in styles for an artist.”

Among the purchasers of serious Deckers: Actress Tallulah Bankhead (who bought a painting of Barrymore as Hamlet), art-loving Errol Flynn (who paid $500 for a deep-toned landscape entitled Before the Storm).

An archtypical Hollywoodman, John Decker, 47, was born in San Francisco. In his young manhood he appeared briefly on the stage, remembers playing a part in a Maxwell Bodenheim-Ben Hecht playlet called Master Poisoners. When his theatrical career flopped, he launched himself as an independent artist by cleverly copycatting famed portraits in which he substituted the face of his current sitter. Decker’s first work of this kind was an “old master” portrait of divinely crosseyed Comedian Ben Turpin. Then he painted Charlie Chaplin in the style of twelve old & new masters including Frans Hals, Picasso, Howard Chandler Christy. Chaplin bought all twelve.

Thereafter Decker had plenty of sitters, collected plenty of fat fees. He also instituted a point system, rationing only one portrait to each subject. But the sitter was permitted to choose the famous painting he wished to be dubbed into. Harpo Marx was painted as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, Charlie McCarthy as Hals’s Laughing Cavalier, W. C. Fields as Queen Victoria. Prices for these efforts sometimes ran up to $1,000. Says Decker (who suffers from ulcers and diabetes): “An artist doesn’t earn a living until after he’s dead. People buy his stuff and then hope he’ll die pretty soon so the pictures will be worth more.”