Art: Mime Enters

The opulent plush-carpeted Ehrich-Newhouse Galleries of Manhattan held an important, impressive display of landscapes last week. Reviewing the development of that field of art from the 16th to the 19th Century, they were able to find in their vaults such impressive masterpieces as a St. Jerome in the Wilderness by Paolo Veronese, a murky Spanish scene by Murillo. a rainy day in the English hills by Gainsborough, not to mention Constables, Cromes, and a fine Corot of the best period. The show represented a great deal of money, but critics and visitors neglected it for the corridor and side rooms where were displayed over 200 sketches, landscape drawings, archeological studies, costume plates, water colors and oil portraits by a remarkable young woman named Angna Enters.

Critics and pressagents, at loss for a word to describe just what Miss Enters does for a living, call her a mime. She is not a dancer for she has never made a pirouette in her life. Nor is she an actress for she never speaks a line on the stage. Yet with enormous skill and considerable sly humor she postures and grimaces through pantomime sketches of her own devising in elaborate costumes that she not only designs but sews herself. Eight years of it have given her a comfortable income, scrapbooks full of superlatives in three languages and last spring a Guggenheim Fellowship to study Hellenistic art forms in Athens.

Mime Enters has high cheekbones, a big mouth, straight black bangs, great vivacity. She is excessively reticent about her early life. She was born in New York City about 30 years ago, had a comfortable bourgeois childhood and developed an urge to paint. She had a job in the daytime but attended night classes at the Art Student’s League under shock-headed John Sloan. Fellow students remember her as the girl that solemnly writhed and grimaced while drawing. When John Sloan praised her work she thought he could not be a good teacher, left his class, disillusioned. Because she thought her paintings lacked form she studied movement and dancing. With $25 she hired the Belmont Theatre one Sunday evening in 1926. She made some costumes and got a friend to play a tinkling piano behind curtains. Monday morning Manhattan began hearing about Angna Enters, Mime.

In the ensuing eight years it heard a great deal, but Angna Enters, Painter, remained a nonentity until 1932. that year Mrs. Edith Parsons Morgan saw some of her costume designs. Mrs. Morgan fired Art Dealer Walter Louis Ehrich with her enthusiasm for this young artist. Angna Enters finished 65 drawings in five weeks in dressing rooms, on trains, in hotel bathrooms, and gave her first exhibition. Then came the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Most interesting results of that voyage on display at the Ehrich-Newhouse galleries last week were 181 line drawings of Greek art forms, “notes” made by Miss Enters in the British Museum, the Louvre, the Athens Museum, which, with economy, delicacy and humor recaptured the spirit of the archaic age she was studying. In her water colors she had a surrealist group, using again & again a dressmaker’s form and a wooden-jointed lay figure. Of her first five oils one was a portrait of the late Henry Taylor Parker, Boston’s famed music critic. In this world Mime Enters and Pundit Parker never met but they were warm admirers, corresponded for years. She attended his funeral last spring, and from photographs and the descriptions of friends painted his picture.