Art: Modern Archaist

Meraud Guinness (pronounced Merode Ginnis) was the eldest beautiful daughter of the beautiful Mrs. Benjamin Guinness of New York and London. At the celebrated ball given by the Guinnesses for their servants in 1926 at their town house in London, Meraud and her sister, Tanis, entertained with songs & sketches. They and their innumerable cousins of the rich and fecund Guinness family (brewing) were chief among the Bright Young People whom Evelyn Waugh parodied in Vile Bodies. One of their inventions was the Treasure Hunt—a fad which began by perturbing nocturnal London, traveled to the high schools of the Far West, became the Scavenger Hunt and returned to Paris via the cinema (TIME, March 27).

Meraud, named doubtless by exotic derivation from émeraude (emerald), took after her mother in an eccentric love of painting. She learned to draw accurately at the strict Slade School. She carried a little suitcase instead of a handbag “because,” she told the supercilious young Marquess of Donegall, “the damned thing holds more, you fool.” One day she ran off to France with Señor Alvaro Guevara, a charming Chilean painter whose portrait of Poetess Edith Sitwell hangs in the Tate Gallery. Tentative little paintings by Meraud Guevara began to. appear in the Paris Salon des Independants. That was ten years ago.

Last week Meraud Guevara had her first exhibition on Manhattan’s 57th Street and the critics went down like ninepins. Her 26 paintings at the Valentine Gallery, all done in the last two years, showed a quality which is rare in art and which sometimes starts more enduring fashions than Treasure Hunts: the intelligent mastery and transforming use of a great past style. In this case it was the so-called “archaic” coolness and clarity of form of 16th-century French painting, after the great portraitist, François Clouet. The line in Artist Guevara’s pictures seems almost engraved; her forms are firmly rounded, spick-&-span, in cool, grey-blue space. Most impressive: the Seated Young Woman (see cut), plump and brown in a red skirt and an airy room.