"All the More Interesting"

It was only a small local exhibition, in Loughborough, in Britain's Leicestershire, but the critics agreed that it had one really notable painting. Figure 8, Skegness, the picture they singled out, showed a whirl of bright-colored roller-coasters against a sea blobbed with boats. Wrote one critic: "A fine specimen of modernism by the Barrow-on-Soar artist, Thomas Warbis ... A study of it will be all the more interesting in view of the present controversy in the art world concerning a famous artist's [Sir Alfred Munnings] attack on modernism." Added the Loughborough Echo: "Mr. Warbis' [picture] will prove the subject of a good deal of speculation."

Loughborough lowbrows were less impressed with Skegness, and Alfred Warbis, father of the painter, shared their opinion that it was not much. A commercial artist by trade, the senior Warbis had two academic pictures in the show himself, was surprised to find them somewhat eclipsed by his son's work. Skegness, said Alfred Warbis, was "horrible--he's got the boats upside down, and he couldn't even sign his name; he had to print it."

The elder Warbis might have been exaggerating his dislike of son Thomas' work, for Warbis senior had submitted it to the exhibition in the first place. When Warbis junior and his mother went to see the show, the young artist had a chance to defend his own painting, but he had nothing to say for publication. He simply grinned at the flabbergasted gallerygoers. Once he went off and stood on his head in a corner. Modern Artist Warbis was just seven, had painted Skegness at six.

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