Art: Automatic Painting

Among the oldest, most conservative of Manhattan art marts is the Knoedler Galleries. Last week its suave brown velvet walls burgeoned with weird birds, impossible flowers, strange writhing figures wrought from paint so thick that it seemed as much sculpture as painting. Art critics, society reporters and psychiatrists hurried over to see them for three reasons: Brilliant color and an unquestioned sense of design make them worthy of serious attention as works of art. They were painted by the third wife of wealthy Irving Ter Bush. Mrs. Bush insists that they are "automatic paintings" produced under occult control.

"When I feel the urge," said Mrs. Bush last week. "I simply pick up my brushes and begin, usually down in one corner of a large canvas, without the slightest idea what is going to happen. . . . However, I don't go into a trance or anything. Oh dear no. nothing like that!"

The former Marion Spore of Bay City, Mich., redhaired, fortyish Mrs. Bush (sister of Naval Commander James S. Spore, onetime Governor of Guam) has been a practicing dentist and a practical philanthropist, known in the penny press as "The Angel of the Bowery."

Twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, she used to stand at the head of a long line on Manhattan's Bowery, handing out meal tickets, clothing, spectacles, false teeth, wooden legs, etc. to those in need. It cost her and her friends $35,000 a year, was abandoned when Financier Bush decided that other relief agencies were handling the work effectively.

Mrs. Bush's "automatic painting" started eleven years ago at the time of her mother's death. Grief stricken, she pondered suicide, suddenly felt an uncontrollable desire to paint.

Whatever the spirit that paints Mrs. Bush's pictures, it has a morbid mind. Peace, most interesting canvas on view last week, showed the face of a drowned girl floating in water sprinkled with flowers, while over it hovers a weird bird with a very long beak and a tightly curled tail.

"I don't understand it," said Terminal Man Bush last week, "though I am beginning to like some of the things in spite of myself."