Art: Successful Man

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Millard Sheets's watercolors look a little like illustrations for a travel folder, but they have a dash about them, and unmistakable crowd-appeal. Hollywood's art lovers, from the Edward G. Robinsons to the Johnny Mercers, turned out in style one night last week to open Sheets's new show: views of Mexican mountains and market places whipped up from sketches he had made on a three-week tour in January. Highballs in hand (it was that kind of opening), the stars rubbed elbows with local critics and museum directors.

At 40, Sheets is one of the most versatile and successful of U.S. artists; he seems more like a bland, blond bond salesman. Sheets is one painter who can look his patrons in the eye and remark, without a deprecatory smile, "I'm no genius."

"Genius has its place," Sheets adds. "It stimulates the rest of us and it has raised the general prices of art. But most artists make a grave error when they try to imitate the peculiar ways of geniuses—longhaired and dreaming."

Sheets is up at 7 every morning, to start a round of activity which permits no time for dreaming. In one day he may drive into Claremont for a meeting of the City Planning Commission, confer with his partner (he is also an architect) about the design of a new church or country club, teach a class at Scripps College (where he heads the nine-man art department), and paint a picture. Evenings—unless by chance he has been asked to make a speech on foreign affairs—he devotes to his wife and four children and to the guests they usually have visiting them.

"I am an artist-teacher-architect," Sheets explains. "If I contented myself with painting I would not be living a well-rounded life. One of my students asked me the other day how many materials I had worked in, and I counted 75 including pottery."

A second Sheets exhibition, which opened in Los Angeles' State Exposition Building almost simultaneously with the first, showed something of his range and of his success. On the walls were menu covers for a steamship line, designs for his pastel-painted airports, drawings done as a LIFE war artist in India, silk-screen prints, lithographs and photographs of buildings on which he had collaborated, sculptures done for a chichi Hollywood bar, a huge restaurant mural in mosaic. "People think of me as a watercolorist," says Sheets, "because I've painted so many. Watercolors can be done in a hurry."