Encausticist

If a great-great-grandson of Paul Revere should hold an art exhibition in Mexico it would be news. Last week Mexican Satirist Luis Hidalgo held an exhibition of his brilliantly colored little figures in Manhattan's Arden Gallery without a single critic recording the fact that that round-faced swart young man is a direct descendant of the patron saint of Mexico's independence, fiery Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, who captured the Spanish prison of Dolores in 1810, declared Mexican independence, prematurely, and got himself imprisoned and shot for his pains.

Most Mexican artists with whom the U. S. is familiar are amiable bohemians who never leave the Federal District of Mexico if they can help it and who cover vast acres of plaster with humorless protests against the bitter plight of the masses. Artist Hidalgo hates parties, is intensely serious, neither drinks nor smokes, works ten hours a day, owns only one suit of clothes, and has traveled by ox cart, automobile and burro in every state in the Federation studying the Indians of his land. Professionally he is a humorist. His little wax figures, never more than six inches high, are shown in box frames of glittering tin that the artist makes himself. They have little or no social message.

On view in Manhattan last week were 31 which included: a lazy peon sound asleep on the back of a patient donkey, his head on a blanket of bright green broccoli; a toothsome slant-eyed dancing girl, pigtails and red skirts whirling; a bug-eyed Mussolini, giving the Fascist salute; a scrawny-necked bass viol player in the wreck of a brown frock coat; an Indian dancer of Oxaca in a tremendous headdress of flowers and shells. Priced at $25 to $250, they sold fast. Seven were gone a week after the show opened. The sedate Metropolitan Museum of Art owns two; the Brooklyn Museum owns 15.

For seven generations the Hidalgos have been encausticists. Several Catholic churches in Mexico own today wax figures molded by Luis Hidalgo's great-great-grandfather. Luis Hidalgo uses no molds, carves directly in blocks of beeswax without any preliminary studies, guards a secret process that enables the figures, once carved, to resist a heat of 110DEG Fahrenheit without melting. All that he will say about it is that it is a mixture of four acids.

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