Fakirs Resurrected

Jovial Hotelman Sam Shaw of Manhattan put up another $25 in prize money last week and the Society of Fakirs was reborn out of the Art Students' League, with an exhibition, auction and dance. The original Fakirs, founded 40 years ago, was a convivial society of League students who wanted to raise money to give scholarships during the summer to deserving fellow members. They did this with an art exhibition of "fakes"; parodies of well known pictures, generally those exhibited in the National Academy, and a costume ball.

Burlesque paintings are usually popular with the public. Commercial artists joined the Fakirs to try their hand at burlesque and swell the scholarship fund. Since the National Academy makes a great to-do over donating its prizes, Patron Sam Shaw used to give a ist Prize of $25 in pennies and a hot mince pie to the best Fake of the year. The Fakirs Ball was even more appreciated by the public which quickly discovered that the Fakirs, in their anxiety for scholarships, had much more liberal ideas than the Beaux Arts Architects about the proper way to run a costume ball. There was no debutante-encumbered Pageant. Costumes could be anything at all, and very little of that. Broadway took the Fakirs to its bosom, as did collegians and Greenwich Village girls. Popularity was the death of the Fakirs Ball It got so tough it had to be killed. There were battles royal on the ballroom-floor. Drunken youths played the hat & coat game in the cloakrooms. Chorus girls had their clothes torn off. Somebody shattered the chandeliers in the Hotel Astor; next year the Fakirs rolled table tops down the Commodore stairway, injuring several passersby. The Fakir exhibitions stopped in 1917, but the Ball went on. In 1923 New York hotelkeepers banded together and announced that so far as they were concerned the Fakirs might hold their Ball in an armory, ball park, stadium or prize ring, but nor in any hotel in New York. After a few years of raucous reunions in downtown Webster Hall, the whole thing died.

Recently Art Students' Leaguers thought the memory of those ancient brawls was dim enough to try it again. As were the old Fakirs at their inception, the new society is limited to League students, but they have one more connection with the old society. Sam Shaw is still their patron and benefactor.

Samuel T. Shaw, deaf, white-haired, was once an art student but he went into the hotel business to make more money. With Simeon Ford, chief rival of Chauncey Depew as an after dinner speaker in the terrapin stew era, he owned the lamented Grand Union Hotel on 42nd Street. The Grand Union vied with Delmonico's and the Cafe Lafayette for the best food in the city. Its Hasenpfeffer and roast oysters were famed. It boasted a vast T-shaped bar at which beer was dispensed from the transepts, mixed drinks along the nave. Like every other hotelman, Sam Shaw was bothered by the problem of washroom literature. He solved the problem by putting up in the men's lavatory an enormous blackboard, bisected by a white line. One side was headed POETRY the other PROSE. There was plenty of chalk for the suddenly inspired, an eraser for the censorious. In 1914 the city bought the Grand Union and tore it down in the course of subway construction. Since then Sam Shaw has lived in moderately comfortable retirement with his pleasant French wife (see cut).

Sam Shaw owns a fine collection of the earlier Fakes, which he invited the new Fakirs to study. Last week he gave his prize (a check instead of pennies) to Beata Beach, daughter of Sculptor Chester Beach, for a parody of De Witt M. Lockman's Academy portrait, His Ancestor's Uniform. The original showed a baldish gentleman in pince nez, leaning against a colonial mantelpiece in a Revolutionary uniform. Fakir Beach showed the same man, completely nude, against the same mantel, under a portrait of an ape.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.