Etchers

With cakes, nut-bread sandwiches and pots of tea, the ladies of the Society of American Etchers opened the organization's 20th annual exhibition at Manhattan's National Arts Club last week. Licking their buttery fingers, critics inspected 246 prints by practically all the best known etchers in the U. S., found prices ($4 to $36 a print) reasonable, technical excellence uniformly high and subject matter more than a little dull, despite the presence of a few startling prints by Reginald Marsh, Paul Cadmus, Harry Sternberg. Quite lacking in false modesty is the society's president, John Taylor Arms. His annual prize for the best piece of technical execution he entrusts to no jury, awards on his own hook to a print of his own choosing for reasons of his own. He gave it last week to Thomas W. Nason of Reading, Mass. for a finicky line engraving of two hayricks, a barn, a dying oak tree.

There was little criticism of the society's chief award, a $50 first prize to Kerr Eby for an impressive oblong plate, September 13, 1918. This etching showed an endless line of steel-helmeted soldiers plodding on toward the Front under an enormous black cloud while lines of wounded squatted in the ditches, waiting for them to pass.

Almost alone of all the first-rate artists who have painted, drawn and graven the War is Kerr Eby, in that he actually served in the line. Tall, grey-haired and 46, he was born in Tokyo, son of a Methodist missionary. Four dollars a week as a lithographer helped put him through art school in Manhattan. He went to France with the A.E.F. camouflage service, was attached to innumerable artillery regiments, never rose above sergeant's rank.

Etcher Eby came out of the War with a sure mastery of his own craft and a virulent horror of what he had been through.

For a few years he contented himself with the Gothic cathedrals, Connecticut farmhouses and old doorways that keep his colleagues busy, but for the past three years his needle has done nothing but War scenes. Three weeks ago Manhattan's Keppel Galleries held an exhibition of his recent work, published a little pamphlet reprinting a few of them along with the first essay he has ever written. Its conclusion : "It is said that war is human nature-- that we always have had wars and always will--I do not believe it. Something can be done about it. God knows it is human nature to have syphilis. Nothing could be done about it but to die horribly until one man after six hundred and six tries found that something could be done. Maybe there is no one thing that can prevent another war but I do know that if everyone who has any feeling in the matter at all, said what he felt in no uncertain terms --and kept saying it, that the sheer power of public opinion would go far to make war impossible. I am a very profane man. I am not being profane now when I say, 'For Christ's sake, say or do what you can.' "

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