WHERE MEN STARVE-AND SMILE

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12441, 8 May 1926, Page 11

WHERE MEN STARVE-AND SMILE

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STARVING I

GENIUSES IN MEAN STUDIOS

Appeal to Prime Minister

Sir Joseph Duveen, the famous art dealer , has written to (he Prime AfinisUf protesting against the neglect of Brxtis art. Geniuses are starving in Xtondon. because they cannot sell their pictures—works of art which in years to come map be worth thousands of pounds. mrmnrmin.m mrn rrarnrEEß little sparkle in her eyes. In them, instead, was a dawning recognition of *d)»feat, a realisation that she had failed. I examined several of her pictures and found them merely mediocre. I said so to my friend when we regained the street. He nodded in agreement. “Useless, ”he commented tersely* “Yet that girl has gone on for years. A darned plucky kid, but sneTl never make good. The devil of it is that she’s beginning to know it at last.” “And what will happen when the game’s up?” I asked. Ho held out his hands helplessly, “God knows,” he said solemnly.

''j l°"g room with gap divan at one end, a shaded electric lamp splashing a tea table With colour, a soft-toned gramophone playing a haunting tango. In front of a flickering fire sits a woman with dark, passionate eyes, f oe *jf stance from which is a Veiled invitation to the man who bends over her.

ALONG room with gay divan at one end, a shaded electric lamp splashing a tea table with colour, a soft-toned gramophone playing a , }uiuntin g tango. In front of a flickering fire sits a woman with dark, passionate eyes, every glance from which is a veiled invitation to the man who bends over her.

To the lazy notes of the tango a young man and a scantily-clad girl move across the floor with melancholy precision. Their cheeks touch as they dance. In the corner is a neglected easel with an unfinished canvas, a pot of brushes, an uncleaned palette, and a girl’s garter. .... THE REAL CHELSEA That is the Chelsea of fiction, the Chelsea of a hundred novels and a dozen plays. But it bears as much resemblance to the real Chelsea as a pomegranate does to piecrust. The real Chelsea is nothing like that. It is a place of hard work, little play, few rewards, and fewer income-tax returns. I went down to the much-abused artists’ colony to discover some of the neglected works of British artists. I discovered other things as well. They must laugh, those artists, when they read of the gay revels that are said to take place down there, when they listen to the uttered envies of prosperous business men who long for their “gay, free life.” They must laugh. But in their laughter surely there is something that nearer approaches tears. As thoy turn from their unsold canvases to their uncooked sausages they must have quaint ideas about the novelists who write romantically of their Bohemian life and their gay amours. PATHETIC BARENESS In a one-roomed studio in Titestreet, pathetic in its bareness and poverty, I caught my first glimpse of the struggle that is going on m a thousand other rooms in the same district. There was little furniture, yet the artist worked, slept, and ate in that one miserable room. His bed, unmade from morning, was pushed against a wall (obviously damp) so that he could work near the window. A small gas cooker in a corner might have given out some heat if he had a shilling to put in the meter. Stacks of work, unsold, rejected, stamped with the struggles and poverty of months, lay about the room. I shivered.

“Pfetty cold for a model, isn’t it?” I suggested. “And pretty expensive,” he replied quietly. “A bit of a grind, this sort of thing?” I ventured. “Oh, I don’t know.” For a moment hope returned to the face. “IPs good fun, you know.” “Fun!” My glance went involuntarily round the room.

“Yes, in a way. It’ll bo good to look back on this sort of thing when I’ve turned the corner. I’m not doing too well at present, ag you see, hut things are sure to get better one of these days.” One of these days! The hope in most men’s hearts. One of these days we shall all he chief clerks, or editors, or head salesmen, or 1 managing directors. One of these days this man wilt sell a picture ... or die and become famous. DISILLUSIONMENT THE END Down in Cheyne Walk, of course,' where the successful meh and womenlive, life is of a different hue entirely. There the struggles are unknown, or forgotten, or remembered dimly as a nightmare that happened long ago. King’s road and Cheyne Walk may have the same ideals, but Art has its caste system no less than life itself, and the starving man in the garret must fight liis own battle. “People don’t appreciate art—that’s the trouble,” one middle-aged man told me. “Most of ’em don’t know » decent picture when they see it, and the few who do haven’t the money to buy.” “But all these poor chaps—what will become of them ?” I questioned. He shook his head.

JOKES He finished drawing and said “Thanks.” I stared at "him. “I sketched you while you stood there,” he explained apologetically. “Haven’t been able to afford a model for weeks, you see, and you were just filling a pose I wanted badly for a joke drawing.” “Joke drawing?” “Yes, I try to keep the homo fires burning by turning out an illustrated joke now and then for the cheap weeklies. It gives me a chanoo of getting on with my real work.” I looked at the room again—at its tattered discomfort and dismal tawdriness. “And you can illustrate ‘Jokes?* * I said. * “Why not?” Why not, indeed? What can they not do, those fellows who can blot out ugliness and let beauty run riot on their canvases? ROMANCE I bought a small picture at the next studio I visited. I bought it, not because I think that it will be the means of giving me a comfortable old age, but because I fell a victim to the pleading eyes of the artist’s model. She told me in a whisper that he had only eaten one meal m 24 hours: and he confided that she, was the girl who had come up from his home town to help him win fame and fortune, and that he was going to marry her when the crowds were thronging Bond street to see his exhibition. Every street in Chelsea has Its house of dreams—dreams that may never come true, but that keep men fighting on in the hope that they will come true. I discovered that one meal a day was about the average consumed by the poorer artists. Some have exen Jess than that.

“They’ll get disillusioned,” he anewered sadly, “and lose their ambition. Soon they’ll feel that the game isn’t worth the candle, and they’ll go in for the cheaper drawing and illustrating the kids’ comics Some of them will go back home and take up business. And some will just drift and starve and die.” TRAGEDY OF FAILURE He took me to a studio even more melancholy and dismal than the others I had visited. It was tenanted by a girl 1 She welcomed us, but there was