Autoportraiture

Next week San Francisco's de Young Museum opens its big exhibition of the year: Meet the Artist, a show of more than artistic interest. It will consist of 190 self-portraits by 151 living U.S. painters, cartoonists, illustrators.

No routine-dull museum director, de Young's shy, German-born Walter Heil has long been interested in self-portraiture. For this exhibition he asked picked artists to send two pictures each.

Among those obliging him (with one or more examples) were top-rank painters Kuniyoshi, Benton, Marsh, Gropper, Grosz, Evergood, Curry; cartoonists Thurber, Steinberg, R. Taylor. (Amiably disobliging was twice-married oldtimer Maurice Sterne, who wrote: "Why not have an exhibition to include artists' wives? . . . Some pretty good painters have been married three or four times; these could be numbered . . . and would be an interesting study in retrogression.")

Director Heil will hang a photograph of each subject beside his autoportrait. Says he: "The painter, when he stands ... before a mirror, is for once scot-free. . . If he does not quite like his face, he can subtly improve on it. ... Comparison with the 'objective' photographs will let us detect this easily. . . ."

Many of Heil's contributors interpreted their invitations as a relaxed, sporting assignment, fished into their mirrors for some consummately original conceptions. Notable exhibits were:

> R. (for Richard) Taylor's line-and-wash delineation of himself surrounded by his friends the spiders, the enigmas and the worried toads.

> A dashing, satirical canvas by Left-Winger Bill Gropper, which depicts the artist gaily, aggressively at work on a caricature of Hitler.

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