Art: On View

It is easy enough as a rule to scrape acquaintance with a Pullman waiter. Dr. Frank Gonzales. President of the Armour Institute, quite often exchanged words with Archibald J. Motley who ran the buffet on the "Wolverine" between New York and Chicago. When he found out that Mr. Motley had a young son who liked to paint pictures, he sent for the son and looked at the paintings. This done, he offered to finance Archibald Motley Jr. through his first semester in the Chicago Art Institute.

During the ten years that followed, Painter Motley had to work hard. He waited on dining-car tables, did some light plumbing, some heavy coal-heaving and painted a lot more pictures. One of these, A Mulattress won him the Frank G. Logan medal and prize at the Chicago Art Institute Exhibition in 1925. Last week he achieved the honor of a one-man exhibition in Manhattan, an honor which, so far as is known, no Negro has ever before achieved. To the New Galleries came a motley crowd, including Ralph Pulitzer, part-owner of the N. Y. World.

The pictures, orthodox in technique and lacking the extravagant coloring which Negroes are supposed to like, were good. Technically, the best were Artist Motley's studies of mulattoes, octaroons, quadroons, his Portrait of My Grandmother, and a gay and decorative panel, Parade. Ralph Pulitzer bought Octaroon. But the spectacular and atmospheric illuminations of East African voodooism were more original and hence more noticed. Painter Motley has seen the crowd of anxious dark faces at a fortune teller's door, waiting to be told what numbers to bet on in a gambling game. He paints the same crowd, their black skins grey in the light of a jungle moon, capering through the mad tendrils of a mango grove.

Mahonri Young's sculpture, at the Rehn Gallery, was certainly the best exhibition seen in Manhattan since Jacob Epstein flashed his gauche madonnas on a startled babbittry (TIME, Nov. 28). Those who like to read sermons into clay could speak about the "dignity of toil." Sculptor Young had modeled peasants with sad and sensitive faces, a young girl (Spring in Brittany), Porteuse de Pain, and Porteuse de Poissons, figures of women bent beneath burdens, so as to include not a story but the pitying emotion of a fine novel in their strong and individual faces. His prizefighters were less successful.