Stage Artist

Whistler signed his paintings with a butterfly, usually about two inches across. Swiss-born Nat Karson uses an alp. At 29, Painter Karson is black-haired, intense, an art director of Manhattan's famed Radio City Music Hall. Last week a Karson mural was unveiled in the lobby of Manhattan's Rialto, the Music Hall of its day (1916), but for the last four years a Manhattan movie house specializing in horror pictures. (Harvardman Arthur L. Mayer, the Rialto's owner, calls himself "The Merchant of Menace.")

Nat Karson splashed the Rialto's lobby with Frankenstein, Zombis, King Kong, a skeleton dangling from a scaffold, a ghoul sucking a lollipop. On his signature alp (about a foot high), by way of contrast, he put Laurel & Hardy. All are done with skilled caricature, are no screwier than the career of the young fellow who painted them. Son of a former Russian court painter, he came to the U. S. when he was four. At twelve he joined a Chicago little theatre as assistant to its art director.

During his teens. Painter Karson started a muralitis epidemic in Chicago's financial district. A broker who specialized in utilities commissioned a mural for his customers' room, and Nat Karson gave him one symbolizing power, with a big muscle-bound brute in the middle. Other brokers quickly followed suit. Says Nat Karson: "The more muscles and machinery I painted, the better they liked it. ... When the crash came, they got demoralized and I got demuralized."

After a side foray at industrial design, a field he left after turning out a streamlined harmonica so big that a normal man couldn't get his mouth around it, Nat Karson headed straight for Broadway. Now it keeps him as busy as brokers ever did. In the past five years he has done sets for 35 Broadway productions. Near tops in Broadway stage painting last season was Nat Karson's rapid-fire blend of Negro jazz and Japanese formalism in the sets of the Hot Mikado. His latest, Let's Go, opened last week at the International Casino, on the same night his Rialto murals were unveiled. But these are only side jobs.

At intervals, Nat Karson designs a new show for the Radio City Music Hall. On Monday he makes his rough sketches, on Tuesday helps daub the sets for the Music Hall stage (world's biggest), where a line that looks threadlike to the audience may be six inches wide. Wednesday there is an early-morning rehearsal. After the Hall closes at midnight, the scenery is hung and lighting effects tried, followed by a dress rehearsal, with the full Rockette chorus, until the doors open at 10:30 Thursday morning. "How often I want to call Mr. Roosevelt," sighs Nat Karson, "and get him to declare the rest of the week Wednesday to give me more time."

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