Art: Christ in a Skyscraper

Bearded, apple-cheeked old Frank Brangwyn of Ditchling in Sussex is Britain’s Grand Old Man of Mural Painting. When he told a newshawk last winter that he had had trouble finding a model for a picture of Eve he was painting, a story blathered across Britain’s front pages that Brangwyn had called British women hipless. The streets of Ditchling filled at once with outsize women come to show Brangwyn British hips. Last week Painter Brangwyn, 65, and ill but still full of emphasis, was finishing the fourth of four murals for Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center RCA building, on Man’s Relationship to Society. He and Architect Raymond Hood had affably agreed last winter on a composition showing Christ’s Sermon on the Mount to symbolize Man and Religion. The Rockefeller Center art committee, including Director Herbert E. Winlock of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, suggested diffidently that it might not be “fitting to put the figure of Christ in a business building” as “too strong a representation of an individual religion.” Somebody thought of representing Christ as “a light shining down from Heaven and bathing the Mount.”

When a reporter called last week at Brangwyn’s studio, “The Jointure,” in Ditchling, Brangwyn said that “painting the Sermon on the Mount without Christ was the greatest puzzle of his career.” The reporter remembered that one wall of the RCA Building lobby where Brangwyn’s mural will go was blank last week because Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera had refused to paint Nicolai Lenin out of his great panel. The story blathered across Manhattan’s front pages that “Rockefeller Center Bars Jesus From Mural.” Quietly Architect Hood said, “Whatever Brangwyn does—even if he presents the actual figure of Christ—will probably be accepted.”