Fog Palette

Last March Manhattan's Knoedler Galleries held an embarrassed showing of some of the works of Jules Pascin. The pictures were poorly chosen, the show was poorly attended, poorly criticized. It contributed more than a little to the melancholia which made life unbearable for Pascin himself. Last week was another Pascin exhibition at Manhattan's Downtown Gallery. Socialites, reporters, art critics flocked to it. Standing sponsors were such people as smartchart Editor Frank Crowninshield, Art Critic Henry McBride, Mrs. John Davison Rockefeller Jr., Mr. & Mrs. Samuel Adolph Lewisohn. An elaborate illustrated catalog was prepared. The show was a decided success. Apart from the fact that the first Pascin exhibition contained some of his worst pictures, the second most of his best, between the two shows the artist himself suddenly and horribly committed suicide. To the general public he is already becoming a Character, classed with Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Modigliani, Van Gogh, and Lord Byron, among the rips, rakes, and naughty fellows of the arts.

Jules Pascin was born in Bulgaria 45 years ago, of a Spanish-Jewish father and a Serbo-Italian mother. He was educated in Vienna and Berlin, traveled everywhere, stayed in New York long enough to become a U. S. citizen, spent most of his life in Paris. He hated the rive gauche, and his studio was not on Montparnasse but on Montmartre, right next to the Moulin Rouge, among the music halls, zinc bars, hack stands and sporting houses whose employes and habitues were his models and friends. A few initiates knew that his last name was not Pascin but Pincas. Nobody knew his first name: it was something Bulgarian roughly translated by a French passport official as Jules. Only dealers, critics and reporters ever called him Jules. He always signed his pictures pascin (with a small p). He was known as pascin (pass-kin) to his friends.

Pascin painted voluptuous harlots reclining on couches, abused, half starved little girls, strange indecent flowers, with great mastery of line, but in soft, sad indefinite tones.

"I have seen his palette," wrote his friend and compatriot by birth, Andre Kormendi, last month. "It had almost no colors. It was like a strip of fog. . . . One saw tiny dabs of Neapolitan yellow, a little blue and green, but all of it melted into the black-white-grey which covered his palette softly as the dusk covered his studio."

It has been said that any well brought up young lady who understands pascin's pictures ought to be ashamed of herself. Wrote elegant Frank Crowninshield, dean of foreword writers, last week:

"There were strange and disquieting elements in his work which for a long time baffled and disturbed the public of America. . . . They misunderstood, if they did not mistrust, an eroticism so exquisite and distinguished. Better Renoir and Matisse, they thought, and the more primary Freudian reactions of such masters than a painter so intent on capturing and passing on to us the heat, the fever, almost the libido, of a colored fabric, a seated girl or a garden flower."

About pascin personally there was very little exquisite or distinguished. He was a soft, pale man, sensual and abnormally sensitive, who abhorred fresh air, never rose till the afternoon, occasionally shaved about 7 o'clock. He was a dipsomaniac. His virtues were his amiability, his lack of personal vanity. He made and kept innumerable friends: at his studio 30 to 40 friends gathered daily to chat while he painted; often he would gather a group of 20, men, women and children, and take them with him to some watering place for weeks at a time.

Pascin's wife and his mistress remain on the best of terms, will amicably share in his estate, which was not small.

Two years ago when such wise collectors as the sponsors of last week's memorial show were boosting the market price of Pascin's delicate and decadent women, a French firm placed him under a very liberal contract which gave him an income and a percentage of commissions that seemed to guarantee financial independence. Pascin realized that he would never live to enjoy it : he was dying of cirrhosis of the liver.

On June 3 he pinned a note on his studio door: "Return at 8 o'clock." Twenty-four hours later the sign was still on the door. His great and good friend Lucy Krogh became frightened, summoned the concierge, broke down the door. The studio was dark, deserted. They broke into the bedroom. The shades were down; it took them a minute to realize what had happened. Pascin had slashed his wrists with a razor. Blood spurted over the room but Death came slowly. He stag gered to the wall, scrawled AU REVOIR LUCY in blood with a gory finger, knotted a cord round his throat and hung himself from the doorknob.

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