Art: Husband to Wife

Andre Durenceau and Mrs. Kay Kaplan are partners in painting. He does the work she gets for him. Last week his latest picture and her latest commission arrived in Manhattan in the form of a 2 ft. by 3 ft. easel painting of the Crucifixion (see cut). The work was a present from Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney to his beauteous wife Gwladys.

Lately Artist Durenceau completed for Mrs. Whitney's East River apartment dining room a series of murals containing formalized heads & torsos of huge white Negroes against a pale green background. They cost $5,000. Mrs. Whitney was so well pleased with them that her husband also ordered the Durenceau Crucifixion with which to decorate their home. Its price was likely to approximate that for the mural price. Done in greys, greens and reds, the work took Artist Durenceau three months to finish. Those who viewed it excitedly last week could not make up their minds whether Sonny Whitney had inadvertently stumbled upon a coming young painter who was destined to make a high mark for himself in U. S. art or whether Mrs. Whitney had received a gift horse whose teeth would not stand close and critical inspection.

Andre Durenceau, 28, is an unworldly French-born U. S. citizen who studied at the Beaux Arts in Paris, once designed textiles for the United Piece Dye Works in Manhattan. There he met Mrs. Kaplan, also a designer. In Hollywood, he was given a job as color adviser to Technicolor Inc. in which Sonny and his cousin John Hay ("Jock") Whitney later became heavy stockholders (TIME, June 5). Mrs. Kaplan also went to Hollywood, was persuaded by Durenceau she would be a more successful manager than artist. Her first job as manager was to get commissions to decorate Hollywood homes. He painted murals of horses and gazelles for William Haines, a mural for Leila Hyams, decorated pianos for Joan Crawford, Lionel Barrymore, Lilyan Tashman. He illustrated Oscar Wilde's Selfish Giant and an Anthology of Immoral Poems for the Walpole Press. One Sunday, he decided to sculpt. Lacking materials, he fashioned a statue from coat hangers, the hinges of an ironing board, some mud. His ambition is to give California an open-air windowless architecture.