Art: At 70

Lee Lash was an exuberant, big-eared young art student in the Paris of Trilby and Bouguereau when Grover Cleveland was President of the U. S. In those fine days his father in San Francisco, a lace importer from Prague, had plenty of money. By 1892 Son Lee was a capable painter. Last week at Manhattan’s Keppel Gallery Lee Lash at 70 had his first one-man show.

A lot had happened in the interim.

Cleveland was defeated by Harrison. The McKinley tariff was passed and Father Lash’s lace importing business was ruined. That finished young Lash’s art career.

Someone suggested to Lash that the way to make money was to paint theatre drop curtains with a scene in the middle and advertisements along the edges, such as European music halls then used. U. S. theatre managers, however, did not like them. Thereupon Lash had the further extraordinary idea of painting the advertisements in the middle of the curtain, as though they were signboards in his landscape. Within a year he, his father and brother had sold one of the curtains to nearly every music hall in California, set out to cover the U. S. Presently, Lee Lash and his horrible drop curtains were something every jokesmith in the U. S. had in his repertory.

Then, 33 years late, he resumed his interrupted art career. His specialty became landscape and particularly the roofs of Manhattan. At least once a year he and his pretty, young wife would move to a new apartment where he liked the view. He saw few friends, read the Commercial & Financial Chronicle in the evenings and painted steadily. The results last week amazed Manhattan critics, who kept asking why nobody had discovered Lee Lash the painter before.

All 67 of the paintings and sketches in the Keppel Gallery were views of New York City, mostly from a height. Most of them were lit dully with Manhattan’s typical daytime haze. Brooklyn, painted in the early morning before the factory chimneys got going, was clear and colorful. All were ably rendered pictures, well worth waiting half a century for.