At New York's Delphic Studios Henry Arthur ("Art") Young, 60 plus, held last week his first one-man show. Said he:
"I had to pick out drawings that could be called representative. . . . Such a long job, out of 40 years of drawing for the old magazines, Puck, Life, The Masses, The Metropolitan, so I told Alma Reed (she runs the gallery) that it would also be my last show."
Paunchy "Art" Young has been a figure in U. S. journalism for nearly two generations. An old-line Radical, it is his proudest boast that he is the only U. S. cartoonist ever to be tried for sedition as a result of his pacifist pictures in the old Masses during the War. (Two jury disagreements resulted in a mistrial.) "Art" Young has two predilections, Hell and trees. His interest in Hell started as a boy when he used to pore over the family copy of Dore's Dante. . His first book of infernal drawings, Hell Up to Date was published in 1892. Another followed in 1901. A third appeared last week.* All these depict the plight of a race of pudgy little people who, all hot and naked, are pursued through dozens of imaginative infernos that mirror the modern world. Most of these drawings were made in his square, asbestos-shingled studio in Bethel, Conn., which resembles a shooting gallery. The quality of Art Young's drawing, like that of all extremely productive artists, is highly irregular. The best is almost worthy of that of his model and hero, the late great Paul Gustave Doré. Among the better Hell drawings is one entitled "Clock Conscious." Two other Hell drawings of note: "The Idiot Giant War," an obscene, pinheaded, hog-faced beast with ostrich feathers in his rump, gulping fistfuls of men from a great bowl ; "Trying to End it All," a pale and flabby Hellion, who has just slashed ineffectively at his nude paunch with a dagger.
Relics
Unlike the slick, undignified bargaining in London's Sotheby's and Paris's Hotel Drouot, art auctions in Manhattan's American Art Association-Anderson Galleries are conducted with éclat. Dealers and bidders sit in a sombre Italianate hall as big as a small theatre while the auctioneer intones numbers from his pulpit. Across a shrewdly lit, velvet-hung stage Negro attendants parade the objects to be sold. If the objects or their owners are of sufficient importance, the sale becomes a major date in the Manhattan social calendar.
That it was on both counts for five days last week. Fully 2,000 people at a time crowded the gallery. So many socialites jammed the front rows that one eager bidder at the rear of the hall had to perch on the back of a chair with a pair of binoculars and signal his bids as he got the range. On sale were the furniture, jewelry, silverware and clothing of the late Edith Rockefeller McCormick, eccentric daughter of pious John Davison Rockefeller.