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[[image - a painting]]
THE INLET—GLOUCESTER
by H. L. REDMAN

In the recent one-man exhibition at the Montross Gallery. 

sance influence peeps through The Morning Paper or The Dressing Table. The external aspect has been echoed; the vivifying inner lift has not been recaptured. 

Obviously this is a dangerous tendency in painting, to copy the outsides of things and to omit the vital functions. It leads to a habit like that of embalming mummies. Moreover if the inspiration of past styles is always to be evoked at the expense of failing to create our own modern voice, how can we hope to speak truthfully of the deep and weighty experiences of our time? Such canvases as Women in a Store, Glove Counter, and even Business Lunch, and Bench in Washington Square, have overtones of an older style of painting; the shadows of flesh tones are too heavily glazed with gray; the flesh seems soft and flabby. It is significant in this connection that the women of Mr. Miller's pictures are always the same women, fat, dull, lifeless creatures, slightly faded blondes or old women who were once blondes. The nuance is weary and skeptical, the attitudes static and posed. There is here nothing worth loving, nothing worth believing in, in fact nothing worth painting. Such a point of view is not the most fruitful in creative labor. 

The business-man painter is a type particularly fostered by American civilization where the pursuit of cash is said to blot out all thoughts of culture. In reaction, or compensation, the hard-pressed son of commerce turns to art for gentler energies. Such a case is H. L. Redman, managing director of Saks & Company, who exhibited portraits, still lifes and landscapes at the Montross Galleries in February. The formula above stated may not be exactly correct, since Mr. Redman was born in England; but perhaps in England, also, the pressure of business is great. 

The fruit of two years of work at painting as a hobby included in the Montross show presented a cross-section of their painter's extra-business interests, people from real life, people from the stage, still life, landscapes from Gloucester and Long Island, New York City views. It was interesting, also, to see a sort of dualism of style revealed, some of the pictures being direct and naive statements, others following a fashionable convention of painting. One portrait, that of Frederick Cole, which had a primitive quality, really functioned as an expression of character. So too in pictures like Little Church with its hard tight box pews, Sketch Under the 'El', Under Brooklyn Bridge, Over the Hill, where over-simplified drawing like a child's produced hard straight fence posts, tree-trunks as slashes of paint, the unconscious naive gesture of a hand confronted with a task too difficult for its technical grasp. This sort of Rousseau touch (we mean Jean-Jacques and his untutored savage) is entertaining to study, though it is not the final answer of the painting problem. 

The water colors of Z. Vanessa Helder on view at the Grant Studios until March 7 show how the painter no more than the writer or composer escapes memories of childhood scenes. For the most successful of these pictures are the wide sweeps of canyon and coulee, of mountain range and wheat field which are the characteristic grammar of her native state, Washington. Coupled with this inbred love of land is an active interest in the curiostities [[curiosities]] of what man has done to the earth, as in "1886", a painting of a red stucco dwelling, American Gothic of the West Coast, with patchwork stained-glass windows. This concern for the American provincial vernacular is a logical development of present-day trends in subject-matter, and when it is not mannered or forced, it can produce good work. Lathe Turnings, with the emphasis on decorative patterns, is amusing as design; but one trusts that factories take more precautions to protect their workers from decapitation. 

Also on view until March 7 is the annual exhibition of work by members of the Brooklyn Society of Modern Artists. Organized by the society's exhibition committee, Herbert B. Tschudy, chairman, this exhibition is the first to be held in Manhattan, previous shows having been held in the Grant Studio's Brooklyn quarters. A pair of portraits by Virginia Snedeker, The Artist and Blue Boy, are the first thing to catch the eye, having a kind of directness which is appealing. Harry Hering's Winter is a modest and unassuming but honest piece of painting, while Charles Harsany offers a large abstract pattern. Houses in Winter.

Varied exhibitions are on view at the Brooklyn Museum until March 27, including the ninety drawings by Lachaise with sculpture, the exhibition on "The Examination and Conservation of Works of Art" arranged by Sheldon Keck and John I. H. Baur, and "Child Art of the American Indian," arranged by the museum's education division. Esthetic pleasure, improvement of the mind and related purposes all are served. 

TWENTY-SIX