Art: Bransgrove Blasted

It is the scornful, if inaccurate, sniff of young modernists that in its 108 years the National Academy of Design has never produced a first-rate work of art. Neither, for that matter, has it ever produced a first-rate scandal. But last week it came dangerously close to it. Boiling with suppressed excitement, President Jonas Lie summoned newshawks to his studio, fed them cheese snaps & Scotch whiskey, and announced that for the first time in its existence the Academy had just expelled a member, “for conduct considered prejudicial to the Academy.”

To the 1933 spring exhibition of the Academy, an Australian artist named Stephen Bransgrove submitted a study of bulbous furry-footed horses entitled Clydesdales. Academicians liked it so well that they awarded it the $300 Ellen Speyer prize for animal portraiture, and knowing practically nothing about the artist, called him before the committee and elected him to membership. Respectable Portraitist Henry Rittenberg was proud to do Stephen Bransgrove, A. N. A. This spring Academician Bransgrove submitted another canvas of a man, a girl, five setters and a shotgun. Another more acute Academician discovered that, line for line, stroke for stroke, it was a copy of a picture by one H. Septimus Power now hanging in the National Gallery in Sydney, Australia, and reproduced in full color in the 1927 Christmas annual of Table Talk. Then came the disclosures: Stephen Bransgrove A. N. A. apparently never painted an original stroke in his life. Directors of the National Gallery in Sydney had purchased one Bransgrove canvas and were about to purchase another. Originals of both were covers of The Literary Digest. Proudly on view in a Sydney Art Gallery was still another Bransgrove canvas last week. Entitled Heading South, it showed a man on horseback riding through a clearing. The original of that one was a Maxwell House Coffee advertisement, first painted by able Commercial Artist Haddon Sundblom.