Bush & Brush

Waldo Peirce has always been as much noted for his shady whiskers as for his sunny paintings. Last week the balance between bush and brush was temporarily destroyed. Woolly old Waldo emerged from behind his beard, and the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Me. staged a big retrospective show of his art.

The 65-year-old down-Easter went at his barbering with the same slapdash spirit that characterized his paintings. On Sunday he hacked off the beard, but didn't have the heart to disturb his drooping, discolored mustache. On Wednesday he emerged new-mown from the bathroom minus even the mustache. "Ellen," he said of his young, pretty wife (his fourth), "had never seen my face naked, and I thought I'd better let her have a look."

Up the Dervishes. Thirty miles up the coast from Peirce's house, Rockland citizens were getting their first good look at the history of his art. It began with a dingy little Roman Forum painted in 1911, three years after Peirce graduated from Harvard and set forth to explore the views and dives of Europe. After driving a model-T ambulance in World War I, Peirce toured Spain with Ernest Hemingway, produced the exhibition's dark, swirling Bulls at Pamplona. In Tunis, he settled down long enough to be elected to the Isawa, a whirling-dervish society founded about 1500. While there he painted local scenes in the flat, bright manner of Henri Matisse.

The depression of the '30s brought Peirce home, and home apparently deepened his art. Abandoning Matisse, he found a more congenial master in Renoir, though he never approached Renoir's skill with a brush. A third of the paintings in last week's show were studies of Peirce's third and fourth wives and their five children, warmly and sometimes clumsily pictured in action. Today his kids chase Indians, blow trumpets and sail boats across the walls of a number of leading U.S. museums. Far from being great art, Peirce's paintings of his family glow with a health and happiness rarely found in more ambitious pictures.

The same glow animates Peirce's action-crammed paintings of the circus and of county fairs. In his flower pictures, which he paints in as little as 15 minutes, it becomes mere fireworks. And in such conventional efforts as his portrait of Bar Harbor's Dr. Clarence Little holding a mouse, it disappears.

Down the Cow. As gusty as he is lusty, Peirce talks a high, nasal torrent, mixing gamy reminiscences of the good old days with whatever notions happen to float through his head. At one moment he remembers persuading Hemingway to fight a bull in Spain while Peirce stood by with his Kodak to record the scene for posterity: "Only it was a cow. He damn near got killed, and then I found out there was something wrong with the camera--no picture." At the next moment, his mind still running to Hemingway, he offers a literary pronouncement: "Four-letter words are all right when you're talking, but it's no good to put them in print . . . It would be better to do it with smoke, like in skywriting."

Even when he talks art, Peirce succeeds in doing it simply, without the troubled air of most artists. "It's damned hard to judge what kind of a painter you are," he says. "For me painting is a sort of toy shop--something to play with."

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