Next week San Francisco's de Young Museum opens its big exhibition of the year: Meet the Artist, a show of more than artistic interest. It will consist of 190 self-portraits by 151 living U.S. painters, cartoonists, illustrators.
No routine-dull museum director, de Young's shy, German-born Walter Heil has long been interested in self-portraiture. For this exhibition he asked picked artists to send two pictures each.
Among those obliging him (with one or more examples) were top-rank painters Kuniyoshi, Benton, Marsh, Gropper, Grosz, Evergood, Curry; cartoonists Thurber, Steinberg, R. Taylor. (Amiably disobliging was twice-married oldtimer Maurice Sterne, who wrote: "Why not have an exhibition...