BIG SPENDER

FEW sights can be more pleasing to art dealers than the appearance at their doors of Joseph Hirshhorn, a garrulous, hurrying little man with a big cigar. Multimillionaire Hirshhorn (TIME, Feb. 21) works with headlong intensity at his mining interests (uranium, gold, oil), "steals time" every week or so to make a whirlwind visit to a gallery. "I'll be in the middle of a meeting," he explains, "when I'll just get up and tell the boys I've got to go, but I don't say where."

Hirshhorn may begin his tour of an exhibition by stepping briskly over to the dealer and demanding to know how many kids the artist has and how his work is selling. If the kids are many and sales few, Hirshhorn sees one more opportunity to "be a decent guy." He glances swiftly at the pictures, hoping hard to find some that "sing," or, better yet, make him "feel weak." In a pleasantly weak mood, he may order a dozen or more in as many minutes. Over the past quarter of a century, Hirshhorn has amassed some 800 contemporary American paintings, more than all but two or three museums possess.

Hungry Seagulls. Hirshhorn's random net inevitably scoops up many second-rate paintings, but it also snares some splendid ones. Among his finest recent purchases is Philip Evergood's American Shrimp Girl (opposite). One of the most versatile draftsmen alive, Evergood took obvious delight in depicting the hungry seagulls that circle the girl's head, and contrasting their eager grace with the girl's heavy-limbed, foursquare pose.

Evergood's canvas is a New World extension of Hogarth's more modest hymn to feminine vitality, the 18th century Shrimp Girl in London's National Gallery. Where Hogarth suppressed all detail and strong color to concentrate on his model's glowing face, Evergood does the opposite. His girl is no prettier or more sensate-seeming than a doll, with chalky flesh and blaring costume. Yet she dominates her cluttered setting like a new, pagan deity, a personification of summertime on American shores.

Painter Evergood, a plump and tweedy 53, looks as quiet and gentle as Hirshhorn does quick and forceful. The impression is false. Manhattan-born Evergood was educated at Eton and Cambridge, but says he "wasn't fitted for that academic rah-rah stuff." He studied art in England, France and the U.S., came into his own with the Great Depression and the W.P.A. His choleric temperament led him to heel far left for a time, made him a top "proletarian painter" of the 1930s.

For a while thereafter, Evergood seemed to have been beached on the mudbank of the Depression. His bitterness began to have a period flavor, and fell from favor. But with his like-minded peers Jack Levine and Ben Shahn, Evergood has come back strong in recent years, steadily, if spottily, extending the range of his art. An Evergood show today is apt to run the gamut from gloomy realism through cartoon-style satire to exuberant fantasy, and to include some of the freshest and most skillful canvases of the season.

Easy Breathing. Hirshhorn's own story is as American as skyscrapers. A poor Brooklyn boy who did not finish high school, he started work on Wall Street at 14, made his first million at 28. "That's on record," he says happily, at 55, "and after the first million, it doesn't matter. You can only eat three meals a day-I tried eating four and I got sick. You can't sleep in more than one bed a night. Maybe I have 20 suits, but I can only wear one at a time, and I can't use more than two shirts a day. Money comes easy to me-like breathing. I want to do something useful with it."

Among Hirshhorn's plans for spending his money usefully is the building of a whole new town near his uranium holdings at Blind River, Canada. "This is going to be an esthetic town, laid out for growth," he says. "I've got a Henry Moore and I'm getting an Epstein, a big one, for the square. I'll have a museum there, too. Maybe the miners won't be different because of the beauty, but their kids will." For Manhattan, he is toying with the idea of starting "a salon where any artist could hang his paintings. Young guys can't be seen now. Maybe I'll put my own collection into the salon as a kind of permanent exhibit. Paintings belong to the public."

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