By Businessmen

With some diffidence a big studio in the top of Manhattan's swanky Barbizon-Plaza was opened to the public last week for the second annual exhibition of the Business Men's Art Club, New York branch of the Associated Amateur Art Clubs. That organization is devoted to the proposition that in the world of art, tycoons may become more than just customers. Works exhibited last week were more monuments of industry than of art, but critics beamed encouragement, realized that this club and the others associated with it are the finest refutation of the interminable stories of philistinism among U. S businessmen.

The New York club that exhibited last week is not the oldest but one of the newest branches of the organization. Parent lodge is the Business Men's Art Club of Chicago which was started in 1920, now boasts nearly 200 members, has handsome clubrooms on South Dearborn Street, classes five nights a week. Besides Chicago and New York, businessmen have art clubs in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Denver, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, St. Louis, Los Angeles. Together they claim a membership of more than 600 bankers, lawyers, salesmen, manufacturers, who would rather paint pictures than play golf in their spare time. Admission rules vary be tween the cities. The New York club ad mits no one under 30 (average age 45), no one who is not actively engaged in business.

"Women are not admitted," explains the president, Patent Attorney Conrad A. Dieterich, "because they are not businessmen.

"The sympathy that physicians, surgeons and dentists have for the fine arts is well known. (Vienna boasts a symphony orchestra composed entirely of practicing physicians.) But there are no physician-members of the New York Business Men's Art Club. Manhattan medicos have their own Medical Arts Club. Several dentists, however, are on the B. M. A. C. roster.

Critics paused before a well constructed, firmly drawn portrait by the club's treasurer, grey-haired, dapper Stanley Adams Sweet. Treasurer Sweet in private life is president of Sweet-Orr & Co. (overalls), generally recognized as the first company to market a high grade, tailored overall. Treasurer Sweet has no false ideas of his own prowess as a painter, but insists that his membership in the club has been invaluable in showing him the technical problems that great masters have had to overcome.

Critics last week were inclined to award first prize to Harry Hering, in civil life a photo-engraver, for his boldly painted Maine lobstermen's houses. Like some college football teams, Artist Hering, technically a businessman, is open to the charges of professionalism. He has had exhibitions in professional dealers' galleries.

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