Art: Barter Academy

It has been in existence over a month, but only last week did press & public learn of New York’s Academy of Arts. Immediately the Academy’s bulletin board burgeoned like jonquils in an Alpine meadow with yellow telegrams of congratulation from Pennsylvania’s Gifford Pinchot. Critic George Jean Nathan, Photographer Arnold Genthe, dozens of others. Starting with an idea and an empty room six weeks ago the Academy now boasts nearly 50 pupils, most of them bartering their services as typists, scrubwomen, carpenters or models for lessons in painting, drawing, sculpture, toe dancing, tango, violin, piano, singing.

Founder of the Academy of Arts is a personable blonde of 23 with a questing nose and a passion for self improvement: Eleanor Verande. Her life has not been dull. At 15 she had a job in two of the swankest Paris night clubs, Le Perroquet and Florida, giving imitations of Spinelli. Yvonne Printemps and Mistinguette, in French. At 16 she was Premiere Danseuse of the Lyon opera and at the season’s end was dragged through the streets of Edouard Herriot’s home town by 20 hysterical Frenchmen, dressed as U. S. sailors and shouting “Vive la Poupée!” That summer she spent in the castle of her grandmother, the Baroness Kometer in Austria. At 17 she was back in the U. S.

Since then she has been a Ziegfeld ballerina, won first prize in a Metropolitan art school competition, doubled for Cinemactress Vilma Banky, spent two years in Hollywood and opened her own ballet school.

Miss Verande’s desire to keep up her art studies and her dancing at the same time was the basis for the Academy of Arts. One Sunday morning she telephoned two of her friends; Sculptor William Sewell, pupil of Thomas Benton and the late great Antoine Bourdelle, and Composer Hugo Frey, well-known song writer and musical comedy arranger. They rented a floor in a 39th Street building, moved in a piano, two large mirrors, a model stand and some easels, and opened their university.

Pupils were needed. They advertised for a girl to do office work in exchange for art lessons, and from the first 300 applicants picked ten of the likeliest. The art pupils served as models for others to paint, played the piano for others to dance, scrubbed the floors for singing lessons, typed letters for violin lessons. Because of a Polish cook’s desire to make a dancer of her daughter, the faculty has been fed. There have been enough cash pupils to pay the rent. Since then they have been busy as a brewery. When reporters called last week a perspiring carpenter was revolving slowly before a large mirror. For putting up light fixtures and partitions for dressing rooms he was learning to waltz.