Charter Show

There was some uncertainty as to whether the Charter Jubilee Art Show which got under way in Chicago last week was the largest such exhibit ever housed in one room, but everyone agreed that it was the longest. It was held on the second-floor gallery of Chicago's Navy Pier, where that city's proletariat is accustomed to flock on Sundays for recreation. Distance from the gallery's west entrance to the far end is 1,300 ft., and since the paintings hung on both walls a half-mile march was necessary to see them all.

Last fortnight all kinds of Chicago artists, from spick-and-span dandies in automobiles to tatterdemalions trudging along with their paintings under their arms, began to arrive at the pier at the foot of Grand Avenue. A one-and-one-half-ton truck carted the pictures into the gallery and husky young Negroes hung them up. They needed more than two miles of wire, 5,000 nails. At the press preview a Chevrolet sedan traveling from one end of the line to the other was at the disposal of lazy or legweary newshawrks.

The Charter Jubilee Art Show (Chicago got its city charter in 1837) was open to any Chicago artist regardless of credo and achievement. Each was invited to send two works. Some 500 painters hung 850 canvases, with a sprinkling of photographs, pastels, sculpture. All artists were requested to price their showings and almost all did so. Prices ranged from $1.50 for Gazelle (sculpture) to $10,000 for Typical Historical American Indian (sculpture). On opening day, the show, which will run until Sept. 7, attracted 2,000 visitors at 10-c- a head. At week's end attendance stood at 3,500, sales at $100.

What critics chiefly noted, aside from, an extremely wide range of merit, was a truce in the bitter factionalism which has characterized Chicago art since modernism first burst upon it in 1913. No one was heard of who refused to contribute because an enemy was represented, and painters with grim sociological messages did not stand off in a corner and poke fun at the "Sanity in Art" school, which was in evidence with scads of wholesome snowscapes, landscapes, seascapes. Of abstract paintings there were only two. Geographical range was all the way from The Ninth Hole, Park Ridge Golf Club to Royal Castle, Sweden, Early Morning. Most puzzling title would have been S. Stake's Chrycenthemen if his canvas had not depicted a recognizable flower.

Critics paid especial attention to Todros Geller's swart, black-hooded Spanish Woman, to Macena Barton's solid black-browed Rosana in Purple, to E. Millman's Resting--two vagrants in a -phouse, one sitting on a barrel, the other lolling on a green mattress. Visitors stopped in swarms before L. J. Ambrose's Debutante, a young lady wearing nothing but white slippers being presented by her bosomy mother to a group of starched top-hatted socialites; and Michael Madsen's Statue of Hercules in Action, a picture of two affectionate moppets inspecting a statue group which displays a woman with disarranged clothes being muscled along by three brawny policemen and one plainclothesman.

Prime mover of Chicago's Charter Jubilee Art Show is flag-waving Chauncey McCormick, longtime vice president of Chicago's Art Institute, art impresario of the Century of Progress Exposition, grandnephew of the primordial Cyrus Hall McCormick. Chauncey McCormick who made his maiden political speech (''Save America") in the summer of 1935, is much more tolerant of radicalism in art than of radicalism in politics. When Mrs. Herbert Hoover was caught in a torrential rainstorm after inspecting the Century of Progress art show, gallant Mr. McCormick shooed a traffic officer from his corner to find a taxicab, directed traffic himself in the downpour while the officer was gone. Wisecrackers said that if it had been Mrs. Roosevelt instead of Mrs. Hoover she would have drowned.

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