Art: Painting & Pleasure

A memorial exhibition was last week staged at Manhattan's Whitney Museum. Selected with the collaboration of three top-flight artists—Guy Pène du Bois, Eugene Speicher, Leon Kroll—it honored their friend William James Glackens, who died last May at the age of 68.

A reticent, solid man who loved painting and fishing and studied little else, Glackens won the respect of several schools and generations. Born in Philadelphia, he began his career as an illustrator for Philadelphia newspapers. McClure's Magazine sent him to Cuba to sketch the Spanish-American War, as Harper's had sent Winslow Homer to cover the Civil War. In toughness, gaiety and all-round draftsmanship, his illustrations, of which the Whitney last week exhibited 35, stood with those of his most gifted Realist contemporaries, John Sloan, Robert Henri, George Luks.

For Glackens, as for these other young artists, the fin de siècle was buoyant. In Paris Glackens enjoyed himself painting public gardens, cafés, dance halls in the general manner of Degas and Manet. He exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1895. Among 97 canvases hung at the Whitney show were several glamor paintings of this period done after Glackens returned to Manhattan: Mouquin's Restaurant, Hammerstein's Roof Garden, sledding in Central Park.

In 1908 an exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery of Sloan, Luks, Henri, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, Everett Shinn, Maurice Prendergast and William Glackens first linked these artists as "The Eight" U. S. individualists. None of them changed so much in the next ten years as Glackens. With much observation his versatile eye became intensely selective. As late as 1912 he painted a simple little picture of a snowy square and a lady hailing a streetcar (see cut) which perfectly evoked an atmosphere, mood and period. Then he selected a lighter palette, and from about 1913 on, Renoir became the dominant influence in his work. Many artists have come a cropper under that influence. Glackens succeeded in it.

The flowing brushwork and radiant color scale of Renoir exact joy from an artist and very nearly limit him to that. Clackens' work in the last two decades of his life included fewer sombre or dressed-up studies, more scenes of outdoors and summer. On a Long Island beach he painted early bathing girls in a bobbing timorous ring in blue water. He caught the gaiety of later swimmers from Long Island to St. Jean de Luz.

Though his landscapes sometimes melted too much in atmospheric blues, his design was usually crisp and all his own. In a few pictures, like Fête de Suquet, with its bright, yellow, sunstruck, secretive buildings and dancing figures, he achieved without strain a poignancy of design that some modern painters sweat for. In 1937 the Paris Exposition awarded him his greatest honor: the Grand Prix for painting.