Receptacle

Unofficial but vigorous is the Committee of Twenty on Street and Outdoor Cleanliness, a group of New York City medicos disgusted with the condition of their city's streets. Last week they tempted artists, architects, designers with $750 in prizes for a new and beautiful trash basket or refuse receptacle to be presented to the city for placing at strategic points about the streets. Stoutly Acting Chairman Edward Henry Lewinski Corwin of the Committee of Twenty denied the imputation of New York papers that the contest was for the purpose of creating the Ash Can Beautiful.

"The appellation 'Ash Can Beauty Contest' " said he severely, "is not only facetious but fallacious insomuch as the contest is for a litter basket and not an ash can. . . . The litter basket is to be the receptacle for paper wrappers, newspapers, and other small discarded articles. . . . The purpose of the ash can is well known."

Five hundred dollars awaits the creator of the winning design; there is a second prize of $250 for the runner up. Conditions:

1) No design which is patented or copyrighted will be considered.

2) It should have a capacity of not less than one cubic foot, not more than two cubic feet.

3) It should be designed for attachment to a wall, lamp post, or pole.

4) It must not be made of wood.

5) It should bear an appropriate slogan.

6) It should not be inconspicuous. Receptacle designers should send for

further particulars, should mail their completed designs (colored, drawn to scale, mounted on heavy cardboard), to the Committee of Twenty on Street and Outdoor Cleanliness, No. 2 E. 103rd St., New York City.

Sub-Mediocre

When the Cherry Sisters came to town, 30 years ago, loud was the rejoicing in poolrooms. The Cherry Sisters were blowsy, humorless young actresses who sang sentimental ballads completely off key, in dead earnestness. They appeared behind a serviceable net that covered the stage, and it was entirely au fait for the audience to hurl apples, tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages, other ingredients of a typical New England boiled dinner, throughout the Cherry Sisters appearance. In every town that the Cherry Sisters played, it was an invariable custom for the editor of the local paper to review their act with a column and a half of humor, satire, parody and biting sarcasm.

In just the same way today do New York art critics regard that annual function, the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists ("No jury. No prizes."). Started 19 years ago by a group of young artists in revolt against the pontifical National Academy of Design, all that is necessary to exhibit a picture with the Independents is six dollars and an opus.

Like the Cherry Sisters, the Independents' show is not funny. The Independents of 1930, as of all other years, have a distinct penchant for fat nude ladies, bulging, specific nudes in green, orange and red, lolling in intricate positions. There are nearly a hundred such creatures in the show and not a fig leaf among them. Though there may be considerable humor in one livid nude with triangular legs sprawling on a studio chair (the fat ladies who pose for Independent artists seem to have a distinct disinclination to stand up for any length of time), a hun-dred such nudes leave an impression of acute melancholia. Sprightlier are the political pictures: ruined speculators selling their clothes in Wall Street; Uncle Sam pouring poison into a bottle of whiskey; City Hall Riot, painted on two sheets of wall board by the members of the John Reed Club* which shows a prognathous-jawed policeman with an emerald-green face cracking the pate of an unfortunate individual with a henna nose. Last week's exhibition differed from other Independent shows in that it was a memorial to the late Robert Henri (TIME, July 22). Among the 1,200 examples of self-expression that hung on the exhibition walls, Robert Henri's five sombre sure-fingered canvases shone like good deeds in a naughty world.

Fourteen years ago when Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Bellows, founded the independents, there was scarcely a place in New York where artists who had broken with the academic tradition could show their work. Today modernist galleries blossom in all the side streets, the discovery of artistic talent has become as highly organized as philanthropy, so that Mediocrity appears excellent by contrast with the average. The Independents are, of course, the average.

-John Reed, young Harvard poet, went to Russia in 1918 to join the Soviet Revolution, died of typhus, was given a state burial just outside the walls of the Kremlin in Moscow.

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