Mouillot

A group of critics emerging from Manhattan's decorous Brummer Gallery last week with the name Marcel Mouillot scribbled on the backs of envelopes, wagered that that name would line up with Depression and the New Hats as a subject of smart dinner table conversation before the year is out.

Galleryman Joseph Brummer is only obliquely a promoter of modern art. His business is purveying, to the very rich, old masters, antique statuary, tapestries and furniture. But hoarse-voiced M. Brummer is also a sculptor. He was once a pupil of the late great Auguste Rodin. He knew Henry Rousseau, he lent money to hollow-eyed Modigliani. At the top of his furniture shop is a chaste, grey-hung room where each year he holds four or five carefully chosen exhibitions of modern painters little known to the U. S. public.

Success of his last season was precise, witty Pierre Roy, at that time almost unknown in the U. S., now generally recognized as one of the most important French painters (TIME, Dec. 1). For the past year M. Brummer has been looking for another to launch.

He found him last May in the Gallery Zak in Paris--a long, lean, morose Frenchman by the name of Mouillot.

Marcel Mouillot was born in Paris in 1889 of petit bourgeois parents. Never having lived near the sea his great ambition was to be a sea captain. He fought through the War, emerged in 1918 seriously gassed. A Mlle Berthe Weill who ran a little gallery on the Rue Lafitte took him up. He had a little success, but made no money. Last year he had a chance to do the thing he had always dreamed of. He shipped on a freighter out of Marseilles for a cruise in the Indian Ocean. Four days out the ship was wrecked on a reef off Alexandria.

Marcel Mouillot spent a month painting the desert, the Egyptian villages. Then he shipped East again. In a hurricane in the Indian Ocean he was nearly swept overboard, had one foot seriously injured. He spent weeks on the little known island of Reunion in the South Indian Ocean and explored the islands off Madagascar in a pirogue. Last May he was back in Paris and held his first important one-man show. Critics, especially M. Brummer, enthused.

As a painter Marcel Mouillot's color is almost as brilliant, his draughtsmanship almost as good as the meticulous Pierre Roy, but his subjects are different--not bits of ribbon, seashells or birds' eggs. He paints ships, omitting rigging and portholes, paring the hulls down to essential forms. He does landscapes of jagged tropical mountain ranges, coral-robed natives under tattered banana fronds, and the steel grey lattice work of cranes against a smoky sky. One of his most effective canvases, Trois Mats le Jeanne d'Arc, shows the trim white hull of the Joan of Arc moored at quayside, her three bare poles and spars standing out against lowering storm clouds. For these and other canvases modest Artist Mouillot expects no fancy prices. They may be had for from $100 to $300.

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