Independents

A square-eyed young woman with flowing hair lay on her side on a rolling operating-room stretcher. Down her abdomen ran the bright scarlet streak of a surgical incision, freshly stitched. Above her stood a dapper young doctor in white preparing to give her a hypodermic. In the background another doctor was holding a new baby upside down. Thus last week did Nina Tablada present her idea of a Caesarean section at the 19th annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists on the beaverboard partitions of Manhattan's Grand Central Palace.

Mounted Policeman Olaf Wieghorst showed a picture of his favorite horse, and Poet e. e. cummings exhibited a blue moonlight scene. The Rev. J. Cole Mc-Kim, missionary and jujitsu expert, offered a startling canvas called Surprise Harakiri. It showed an impetuous Japanese gentleman suddenly ripping his stomach open with a dagger before the eyes of his assembled guests.

Eric Curry, painstaking pupil of innumerable life classes, presented a discouraged group of naked men and women piled up on a rock and entitled As They That Watch for the Morning.

The most expensive exhibit in the show was a set of eight elaborate mural panels by one Orencio Miras Lopez called Licanthropy or Aguelarre Babilonico. It showed Lenin in a red shirt, skulls, gas masks, blood, bones, machine guns, cannon, sunsets, and the tomb of Karl Marx. Artist Lopez made headlines by asking $50,000.

Runner-up was John Upley, blacksmith, onetime engraver & decorator at the Rolls-Royce plant at Springfield, Mass., who valued a painting of a hangover at $1,000 the square inch.

Edna L. Bernstein would like to get $350 for a portrait of a petunia. George Constant, who painted zinnias and blue crabs, would take any reasonable offer.

Even humbler was the Rev. Brother C. F. X. Athanasius who had a fine still life of a plate of peaches for $35. Taxi-driver Joseph Dunphy would never have had his two pictures in the exhibit at all if an unknown benefactor had not donated the necessary $8 after appeals printed by kindly newshawks.

Nineteen years ago the Independent shows started on the premise that anyone with a nominal fee ($10 then. $4 this year) and a picture was free to exhibit, served the good purpose of introducing a number of bold young experimenters to a cautious conservative public. Today an artist has to be only fair to get a showing in almost any dealer's private gallery. Of last week's 862 exhibits, almost without exception the only ones that had the slightest artistic merit were those contributed by President John Sloan. Abraham Walkowitz. A. S. Baylinson, Jose de Creeft and other veterans of the Independents' early days. whose sense of loyalty still compels them to send annual contributions.

For over a decade the fumbling artistic strivings of housewives, dentists, firemen, butlers, patent attorneys, and taxi drivers have provided a field day for professional newspaper humorists. In last week's exhibition there was a little section of 25 pictures, just as inept, just as badly painted as the rest, that caused no jeers. They were the work of eight convicts at New York's bleak Clinton Prison, Dannemora, N. Y.

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