Radio Plugs

Twice last week national radio hookups were used to plug Manhattan art shows.

Five days before the opening of the National Academy of Design's noth annual exhibition President Jonas Lie gave an elaborately rehearsed interview over a coast-to-coast network, in which he announced the winners of the $4,400 worth of assorted prizes that the N. A. has assembled through the years. Nobody could see the pictures last week, but from the names and reputations of the winners all the U. S. art world knew that the long-awaited rejuvenation of the National Academy was under way. Except for elderly, conservative Frederick Judd Waugh of Provincetown, Mass, who won, as he has before, the $500 Edwin Palmer memorial prize for marine painting (TIME, Dec. 17), other prize-winners were artists who would have been considered rank radicals by academicians of 25 years ago. Among them were:

Leon Kroll, who took the $1,000 Altman prize for landscapes. His canvas entitled Cape Ann was an excellent picture of three young people in bathing trunks, sweaters, bathrobes, done with all the artist's flair for the human figure.

Jean MacLane, who won the $1,000 Altman prize for the best genre painting with her canvas Tennis Days. In it were to be seen two athletic-looking girls wearing bandannas and two tanned, crop-headed boys in tennis garb.

Childe Hassam, to whom went the Saltus Medal of Merit, only N. A. prize to be awarded regardless of nationality, age, sex, or subject matter, for that old post-impressionist's landscape Evening, Point Alien.

Maurice Sterne, art theorist and Brooklyn expatriate (TIME, Feb. 27, 1933) who won the $100 Thomas B. Clarke prize for the best U. S. figure composition painted in the U. S. or its territorial possessions, with his Plum Girl.

Jerry Farnsworth, able Cape Cod portraitist, whose Jan de Groot took the $150 Thomas R. Proctor Prize for the best portrait in the show.

Two days before the N. A. prize-winners were blindly announced over the air, a national radio audience was urgently invited to visit another Manhattan art show and inspect, at the Arthur U. Newton Galleries, a set of portraits by a small, kinetic, kinky-haired Pole named Stanislav Rembski. Most of those who accepted the invitation, however, went less to see a slick icy canvas of Dr. Frank Damrosch or a promising self-portrait of the artist than to have a good long look at a brand new picture of a smiling, self-confident, wispy-haired man of 45 in a blue serge suit. For the past two and a half years that man has solaced thousands of uncertain minds by broadcasting homely advice as THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE. His sponsors over the Columbia network: Wasey Products (Musterole, Kreml Hair Tonic, and a brace of nostrums known as Zemo and Haley's CTC, for stomach acidity). Last week it was the Voice of Experience who turned his first discussion of Art into neat plug for the Rembski show in general and his own portrait in particular.

The Voice of Experience is actually the voice of "Doctor" Marion Sayle Taylor, son of a retired evangelist who was born on the Louisville plantation whence came Old Taylor Whiskey. After a false start toward the ministry, young Taylor went to Pacific University but decided not to get the medical degree he wanted. The title of "Doctor" was applied to him years later at the suggestion of William Jennings Bryan when he was already well known as an adviser to the lovelorn. Orator Bryan suggested that Taylor call himself "Doctor of Matrimony." Scrupulously ethical in his radio addresses, Taylor is careful never to give any medical advice-- except to endorse the patent medicines which sponsor his programs.

Before adopting the career of mass confessor, Taylor was a proficient organist. He was guest organist at the St. Louis Fair of 1904. An automobile accident that crushed his hands in 32 places took him from the manual.

The name "Voice of Experience" Taylor adopted about seven years ago when he was already well known as a broadcaster on marriage problems. So successful was his booming voice, his "clean handling of sex problems that he now employs 29 private secretaries, all male, to answer his intimate correspondence. In addition to 5,000 broadcasts, Taylor has had time to write 120 pamphlets on such miscellaneous subjects as "Facts About Fruits" (A-19), "Why Be Unique? (B-11), "Insomnia" (C-8), "Why Take Your Own Life?" (C-10), "The Nudist Fad" (E-8), "Feminine Shapeliness" (F-14), "War of the Sexes" (D-5), "Square Pegs in Round Holes" (C-17), "Promiscuous Kissing" (B-10), "The In-Law Problem" (A-13), "Are You Afraid of Insanity?" (B-10). He also has a wife and a daughter, lives on Manhattan's Park Avenue, has a private gymnasium in his apartment to keep himself fit.

The practical private charity that Mr. Taylor does is enormous. From his own pocket he has paid for innumerable funerals, bought wooden legs and glass eyes, met rent bills. In 1934 alone The Voice paid for 413 blood transfusions and the hospital bills of 583 unwed mothers.

The language of Broadcaster Taylor's little homilies often becomes elaborately homespun, to suit the simple tastes of his following. Calling his public's attention to his new portrait last week, he declared:

"In the last ten years I guess I have sat for a dozen or more artists, to have a painting done of me--all but one of these by request of the artists themselves. If I were able to line up all of these paintings side by side, you would find that each one of them had a different expression. . . . That is the reason that a connoisseur of art can immediately say what great artist did such and such a painting, because he sees the artist's earmarks on the canvas. ... I want you to do something practical for me. A number of men, outstanding individuals in the world . . . are now on display at the Newton Galleries. There is no charge for admission, so you go down there and study these canvases. ... It will be a fine object lesson to you."

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