Decorous Jubilee

. . . Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

--Macbeth, Act V, Scene 2.

This year U. S. painting has at last attained an international vogue. The opening of the Whitney Museum started it. Loan exhibitions of U.S. paintings are touring Europe. The Louvre has bought a Thomas Eakins. Famed French Critic Waldemar Georges wrote in surprise six months ago: "Why have we not seen these pictures before? . . . Why do their young men keep swarming to Montparnasse?" For the first time the Venice Bienniel Exhibition of Modern Art will have a permanent building for U. S. painting when it opens in June. Only last month the London Times started a movement to devote the next international show of the Royal Academy to U. S. painting. Canny New York dealers are hastily changing course, pushing French modernists aside to make way for native sons. Dinner hostesses are learning that they must consider Albert Ryder, Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer greater men than Anglophile John Singer Sargent. Last week the Macbeth Gallery, which has fought longer and more persistently than any other for the recognition of U.S. art, celebrated its 40th anniversary with a decorous jubilee.

The Gallery does not claim to be the first to show U. S. painting. As early as 1873 Newman Emerson Montross set aside a room for it back of his Manhattan paint store, but the Macbeth Gallery was indisputably the first to sell nothing but U. S. art. William Macbeth, a quiet little Irishman with a soft brown beard, arrived in the U. S. in 1871 and entered the art firm of Frederick Keppel &; Co. In 1892 he left to start his own gallery of U. S. art. It was a lean time for U. S. painters. Fifteen years earlier the magnificos of the Reconstruction Era used to pay $10,000 to $25,000 apiece for paintings of the Hudson River School. Founder Macbeth sold his first picture a Wyant, for $750. He wrote 25 years later:

"I wish I felt at liberty to name the single family of many members, with separate homes whose early purchases bridged the narrow margin between success and failure." Last week his son, rotund Robert Macbeth, admitted that they were the Pratts of Long Island. Other important collectors were persuaded to buy U. S. art by soft-spoken William Macbeth: Miss Lizzie Bliss, Hotelman Edwin A. McAlpin, Hugh D. Auchincloss, Financier Stephen V. Harkness. Collector Emerson McMillan had such a passion for pictures that he used to come in with a little red notebook and demand:

"Macbeth, what have you got that's 14 1/2 inches high and 28 inches long. I've found a space where it will just fit."

After Collector McMillan's death, when his great collection was dispersed, several pictures were found with frames sawed in half so that he could squeeze them in.

The Macbeth Gallery gave first exhibitions to Homer Dodge Martin, Alexander Wyant, Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, Ernest Lawson, dozens of others. William Macbeth's greatest coup was his sponsorship of his funereal friend, the late great Arthur B. Davies. Sensitive Artist Davies had a studio right over the gallery, lunched with William Macbeth every day, used to bring his pictures down to exhibit before the paint was dry, was always free to borrow all the cash in the till.

William Macbeth died in 1917, but the ideas, the blood of the Founder persist. The Gallery is now operated by his son Robert and his nephew Robert G. McIntyre, as a stronghold of workmanlike, conservative painting. Rotund Robert Macbeth will have no truck with modernists, publishes blasts against such violent fellows as Pablo Picasso.

U. S. Cash Flayed

Not long ago William Addison Dwiggins had a $5 bill. He was appalled. After brooding many months, he published a book last week embracing all his criticisms of U. S. currency.--

Mr. Dwiggins had no fault to find with the U. S. fiscal system. It was only what the money looked like that enraged him. William Addison Dwiggins is a name highly honored by printers and publishers. Born in Chicago 48 years ago he went to Boston at the age of 21 and set up as a commercial artist. Fascinated by typography, he worked in Boston under the greatest type designer the U. S. has produced, Frederic William Goudy, and under one of the two greatest printers: Daniel Berkeley Updike of the Merrymount Press. (The other: Free Lance Bruce Rogers.) Typographer Dwiggins wrote the advertising agencies' Bible, Layout in Advertising. He has designed several beautiful type faces and for many years has been retained by famed Mergenthaler Linotype Co. as typographical consultant. His passion for fine handwriting caused him to found the Society of Calligraphers. He still serves as its secretary under the pseudonym of Hermann Puterschein.

Typographer Dwiggins minces no words in his opinion of the design of U. S. paper currency:

"The paper money is a little better than the average trading-stamp, and a trifle inferior to the usual tobacconist's rebate coupon. . . . The words are there and the letters are there--evidently graphic signs intended to convey a meaning--but they are inscribed in such a fashion and distributed in such a way that every effort of the mind to grasp their significance is frustrated. . . . And this document--this singular document--stands as the prime symbol of value in the infinite transactions of a great commercial nation. It is worth its face in gold, but, my God! what a face!"

He does not stop there. Taking a $5 bill as typical of all U. S. engraved currency he condemns it on these counts:

1) The bill has no "reasonable structure."

2) The ellipse round the portrait of Lincoln is ugly, and "the branches of bay at the base of the ellipse are afraid to declare themselves either as bay or as branches. . . ."

3) Discussing the nest of acanthus leaves round the fat figure 5 in the corners he writes: "No merest tyro in the draughting-room of a wallpaper plant that catered to the Wisconsin Scandinavian trade would be allowed to combine shapes in this brutal and reckless fashion." The 5 bothers him particularly. He reproduces its black bulk on one page followed for comparison by seven 55 from the fonts of celebrated designers. Overleaf is a little drawing of a fat harridan leaning against the Treasury's figure while a slender nymph stands by a modern 5 of Dwiggins design. Then he says:

"The practical mind will comment that there is no reason why an Arabic numeral needs to be graceful or good looking. There is no reason why a young female needs to be graceful or good looking--but we like them that way."

4) The Treasury seal, one of the three actuating signatures of the document, is illegible and canceled by the printed word FIVE.

5) "The outstanding 'use-fault' of the design is its failure to declare the amount in plain characters."

Lest the Treasury Department consider Typographer Dwiggins merely a destructive critic he went further still. The back of the book is devoted to an explanation of what he would do about it with designs full size, printed in colors, for the currency of the mythical Republic of Antipodes: a five crown note; a page of postage stamps; a new cancellation stamp; a design for printed stamped envelopes; a metered mail stamp; a page of internal revenue stamps for tobacco and cigarets.

*TOWARDS A REFORM OF THE PAPER CURRENCY--Limited Editions Club--($5.84).

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