PAINTING BY THE YARD

As art dealers know, too many picture buyers are looking for paintings that will "go with the living room drapes." That gave Dealer Reeves Lewenthal an idea: Why not get easel painters to design fabrics as well as paint pictures? "After all," he argued, "Michelangelo designed the costumes for the papal guards."

Back in 1940, Lewenthal persuaded Grant Wood to translate his famed Midnight Ride of Paul Revere into a fabric pattern--but no manufacturer would buy it. Last year Lewenthal tried again, and got Manhattan's huge Riverdale fabric company to print not only Midnight Ride but designs by seven other painters too. Four are reproduced on the opposite page.

By mid-March the new fabrics--for curtains, bedspreads and slip covers--will be on sale in a thousand-odd stores across the nation. Riverdale's initial printing of close to a quarter of a million yards has brought the average price down to $2.50 a yard. Lewenthal, the plump promoter-president of Manhattan's middlebrow Associated American Artists, thinks that is about right. The market for high-priced art is dwindling, he figures, and art's greatest potential patron is the budget-conscious housewife.

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