Art: U. S. Scenarist

Many a painter of the U. S. scene smothers the characteristic flavor of U. S. types, objects and situations in a technical gravy that has little to do with the U. S. Painters like Grant Wood use a clear sauce distilled from 14th-Century Italian primitives. Painters like Thomas Benton use their own highly flavored, homemade ketchup. One painter who presents the U. S. scene without trimmings is Minnesota-born Arnold Blanch, 26 of whose bleak, overcast landscapes and figure-paintings drew Manhattan’s gallerygoers last week to the Associated American Artists’ Galleries.

For the exhibition, his first in five years, Painter Blanch had scoured the U. S. from the Carolina low country to the Colorado badlands, painting dilapidated shanties of Southern Negroes, sprawling prairie hamlets of the Middle West, dry, cowboy country of the Rockies. Ungilded with backwoods quaintness, unburdened with “social significance,” his paintings let the U. S. speak for itself, from ramshackle farmhouses and clap-boarded Western store fronts.

Born 43 years ago in the little town of Mantorville, Minn., grey-thatched Arnold Blanch started his career by scrawling on the walls of Midwestern privies. His first ideas of painting he got from a maiden aunt who painted flowers on china. When he was about 16 his family moved to Minneapolis, where, inspired by the sight of students drawing Greek casts in the public library, he decided to study art. After four years of cast-copying and life classes, he got a scholarship at Manhattan’s Art Students’ League, where he studied under oldtime U. S. Realist John Sloan, Pundits Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller. After a fling at commercial art (he once designed advertisements for Pluto Water), he was drafted into the A. E. F. and sent to France, where he drew maps for the Intelligence Corps, spent his spare time wandering through the galleries of Paris. His first sizable chance to develop his own style of painting came after World War I, when he joined the A. E. F. University, spent a summer painting in France’s rolling Loire Valley.

Today, Arnold Blanch is one of the few U. S. artists who manage to live almost entirely on the sale of their work. At his home in Woodstock, N.Y., he hunts and fishes, now for sport, once for food. Years ago he earned a little extra money by weaving rugs and tapestries, briefly running a cafeteria at Woodstock’s art colony. He has taught in such noted institutions as the California School of Fine Arts, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Manhattan’s Art Students’ League. But he quits these jobs as soon as he saves enough to put him a few months ahead. Says he: “Most people want to make money so that they can stop working; most artists want to make money so that they can have the time to work.”