PLIGHT OF ARTISTS

Greymouth Evening Star, 19 March 1934, Page 12

PLIGHT OF ARTISTS

EFFECT OF SLUMP IN PARIS

Ultra-modern artists, as well as the “Pompiers”—second-rate painters of the academic order —are having a very bad time in Paris, according to the “Beaux Arts.” The crisis indeed is tragic, even for some of the er*stwhile most prosperous of the modernists. For those among them whose works sold for “formidable” prices the slump came with brutal force. One of the number earned at least a million francs a year; the atelier of another was beseiged by picture merchants and amateurs with commissions for portraits. But all that is finished. Foujita, the brilliant and popular Japanese painter, has been forced to go home to his native land, and Van Dongen, the ladies’ idol, has forsaken his palace in the Rue Juliette-Lambert and is living in a little house in the country. Speculative dealers, realising that a new era had come, broke their agreements with the artists and closed their galleries. Even the big merchants lost courage at the first sign of depression, and so-called collectors engaged in the dangerous game < of speculation lost all the money so- imprudently spent on dealerboomed work. Such was the revenge of Apollo and no one pities them. Unfortunately, says the art critic of the “Morning Post,” their discomfiture has upset the markets where amateurs and wealthy men met and talked about art—and occasionally paid 100,000 francs for a picture which is not worth 10,000 to-day. Able young artists who began when the inflation was at its height are the .greatest sufferers. . .

Various charitable movements have been set afoot on their behalf, but assistance of that sort is humiliating and temporary, and the more independent and courageous of the younger men of talent are accepting the first • job offered, providing that it leaves them an hour or two for their painting.

Some are acting as porters and guides at the Louvre and Luxembourg, a painter and a potter sell cakes in the Rue de Metz. The foolish speculation referred to, which so seriously hit many of the bourgeois, did not in the least affect the “braves gens,” who retained an honest conception of painting for its own sake, and considered a picture solely as decoration for a. wall. It is doubtless difficult to get in touch with this class of amateur. Its members hardly ever risk entering an art gallery, as they cannot afford the prices demanded.