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Eve Sun. March 6. '31 NEW YO PEIXOTTO PIRATES REVEL IN BOYS' CLUB Noted Artist Recreates Spanish Main Bad Men for Kip's Bay Clubhouse NEW HOME OPENS MARCH 12 By RUTH SEINFEL Masters John Goll and Edward Walsh, young clubmen, stopped off on their way home from school to have a look around their new clubhouse. No, not the new Union League Clubhouse. The Union League Clubhouse doesn't hold a candle to this one at 301 East Fifty-second Street, a gift to the Kip's Bay Boys' Club from the Children's Aid Society. It is nearly ready now for the formal opening on March 18, and Masters Goll and Walsh were interested in seeing how things were getting on. They wandered into the auditorium, where, in a few weeks, they will be seeing movies and maybe even talkies, and there a found a man in a smock, standing on a ladder, painting a big picture right on the wall. "Ooh, pirates!" they exclaimed in one breath, and ran closer to peer up at the dashing figures, in bandanas and sashes, with the Jolly Roger floating over their heads. The man in the smock looked down from his ladder, his face crinkling in a pleased smile. "That's right. That's just what they are," he said. Johnnie and Eddie didn't know it but they were admiring the work of Ernest Peixotto, A.N.A., whose work is as well known to the salons of Paris as of New York, whose murals adorn the walls of the Embassy Club as well as their own. They didn't know, either, that he is the author of some half-dozen books and that his travel articles in Scribner's Magazine were eagerly read each month in the years before the war. They would have appreciated the fact, had they known it, that he went to the war with the rank of captain and with the position of official artist to the American Expeditionary Forces, and that he is an officer of the Legion of Honor, which they would immediately conclude was the same as the Foreign Legion. Mr. Peixotto's murals on the walls of their auditorium are his gift to the Kip's Bay Boys' Club in memory of his brother, Sidney S. Peixotto, who was a pioneer in boys' work and who devoted his life to the Columbia Park Boys' Club in San Francisco. The artist himself is also interested in boys, but his interest expresses itself in the young men in his profession. As one of the founders and chairman of the American committee of the Fontainebleau School and as director for six years of the mural department of the Beaux Arts Institute of Design, he has helped many a novice solve his artistic problems. Paintings in Two Moods His paintings, which flank the proscenium arch, represent the two moods of the drama. The buccaneers of the Spanish Main represent, he thinks, a boy's idea of the tragic mood, and he is delighted when the members of the club come and stand before his version of Captain Kidd and Henry Morgan, their faces glowing with recognition. For comedy he has painted a harlequinade, with Columbine and Scaramouche and the rascally Mr. Punch. When Johnnie and Eddie had passed judgment on the artist's work, they went on to the rest of the building, most of the special features of which have been given, like Mr. Peixotto's mural, as memorials to men and women who devoted their lives to helping boys like Johnnie and Eddie themselves. There were the handsome billiard tables for the big boys, and Johnnie and Eddie, who are only twelve, looked them over enviously. There was the big gymnasium and the somewhat smaller gymnasium for the younger boys. But best of all, there was the swimming pool, sixty feet long, and Johnnie and Eddie paused and gazed raptly into the deep end. This was the cue for a picture. Another clubman wandered in and was invited to join the group. He declined, politely but firmly. His father, it seems, doesn't like the idea of his belonging to the club, although his mother approves entirely, and it would make his father very angry to see his picture and his name in the paper. Here Johnnie spoke up. "That's easy. When your father sends you for the paper just take out the part with the picture on it," Johnnie suggested eagerly. No, said the young stoic. That would be like lying. It was a tough break, obviously, when he had a chance to get his picture in the paper, but he stuck to his guns. When the new clubhouse was finished, though, he was going to bring his father over. "He says when he was a kid they didn't have things like the Kips, and so I don't have to have it. But wait'll he sees this place. He'll change his mind then, all right!" With which sentiment Johnnie and Eddie agreed. Kip's Bay Boys View New Club [[image]] John Goll and Edward Walsh, members of the Kip's Bay Boys' Club, admiring the swimming pool in their new clubhouse at 301 East Fifty-second Street, the gift of the Children's Aid Society to the club.
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NEW YO
