Painting Doctor

New Orleans' eminent surgeon Dr. Marion Sims Souchon, 71, leads a double life. After the last patient has left his office (and he wishes the list of patients was shorter), he rips off his white medical smock and pounces on his brushes and paint pots, gets busy on the hobby which has made him, in six years, New Orleans' most original artist.

Last week incorrigibly paint-minded Oldster Souchon finished his 500th canvas. "I must hurry up," said he, "because I'm living now on the velvet of my life." Like many another Souchon, No. 500 depicted a tropically lush imaginary scene, in which flat, doll-like figures galloped and swayed through a high-pitched bedlam of clangorous color. When the last brush strokes had dried, he carefully stored it away in his files of similarly exuberant Souchons: Van Gogh-like pictures of hot, shadowless Louisiana cornfields, quaint, warm-colored, old-worldly interiors, and fanciful, childlike coloristic riots like The Farm (see cut), in which two bright blue mules sit grotesquely under a clump of bone-bare trees while lambs and pigs gam, bol in the distance.

A man of wealth, affable and loquacious Dr. Souchon sells few of his pictures because he doesn't want to compete unfairly with fellow artists who have to make a living with paint. But occasionally some art lover manages to talk him into a sale. He chortles: "If any damn fool wants to pay $500, all right!" Because the art world has not yet crowed much over the effusive, highly personal charm of his work, his exhibitions have been few. For this lack, Surgeon Souchon makes up by holding private showings himself in the mahogany-brown library of his office suite.

While a guest sits comfortably in an easy chair sipping a drink, the open door of the secretary's office, lighted with artificial daylight, serves as a stage. At Dr. Souchon's command a Negro servant places one picture at a time on a big easel, leaves it there until an imperious click from a mechanical cricket in the doctor's hand signals for its removal. Meanwhile Dr. Souchon's secretary takes down in shorthand even the most irresponsible remarks the visitor makes. Painter Souchon, who enjoys showing his pictures almost as much as he does painting them, has secretly collected a whole file of these remarks, and has compiled tables showing which of his pictures draw the most favorable comments. He calls this system his "Souchon Poll."

Descendant of an old French Louisiana family, and son of a doctor father, Marion Sims Souchon took a long time getting around to painting. His first hobby was history. When he had become something of an authority on Napoleon, he started to collect cacti. When air conditioning wrecked his indoor plantation, Surgeon Souchon decided that painting might be more fun, bought himself a set of paints and went to work.

His first pictures, done in what he calls "Brown-gravy classical" style, were conventional, imitative, trite. In 1935 an exhibition of them brought a royal roasting from New Orleans critics. So Painter Souchon changed his style. Turning his back on all the art-school rules, Oldster Souchon picked up his brightest paint tubes, let himself go. Before he knew it, he got so involved in color that his son and assistant, Dr. Edmond Souchon, had to take over most of his practice.

Dr. Souchon, who gets up daily at 6 a.m. to work at his easel, has painted as many pictures as many a hard-working professional. But he asks only one thing of his artistic hobby: that it should be fun. "I've seen so much death and suffering," says he, "I have to find diversion in painting." When he ceases to get any fun out of a picture, he throws it aside and does another one. Because he finds meticulous draughtsmanship a bore, he doesn't even bother to finish the faces in his figures, leaves them eyelessly blank. But the people in Surgeon Souchon's paintings need faces no more than a poem needs footnotes. Effusive and bubbling as Oldster Souchon himself, they make their point not by depicting anything in particular, but by the sheer joyousness of their color. Says Dr. Souchon: "I like my pictures red hot. The only trouble with color is that you can't eat it."

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