tain orange marmalade she'd come to
favor. She was told that the shop didn't
carry that brand. She said she was
sure she'd got it there before, and the
clerk said, "Ah, yes, during the war,
you know, we found it necessary to stock
a number of hybrids."

Clean

WE can report that the thorough
overhauling Trinity Church has
been undergoing is about finished; only
a few things remain to be done, such as
clearing out some old and highly in-
flammable wood from the attic, tuck-
ing a pump for the new, anti-fire sprin-
kler system into the cramped brick cel-
lar, and fitting concealed down-lights
into the groined ceiling above the nave.
We have this on the word of Mr.

Clean

OCT 19. 1946

BOARDMAN ROBINSON, then, represents the middle ground, and his world, as he saw it in the period he surveyed, was a fairly simple one. For really wild divergences from that point of view, take a look at the Stettheimer and Grosz collections. Florine Stettheimer herself was in a sense one of the oddities of the period. The daughter of a wealthy Rochester family, she painted solely for her own amusement, and this posthumous showing (she died two years ago) is, apart from one small exhibition in her student days, the first one ever held of her work. This, of course, is in line with the early Dadaist principle of disdain for public recognition, which led Louis Aragon, in his youth, to threaten

to horsewhip any critic who reviewed his book of poems, and it is no accident, I think, that many of Miss Stettheimer's friends, such as Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, were originally Dadaists. Her outlook on the world was essentially Dadaist, too.

It was a world of fêtes and salons, and as one looks at it now in her pictures, it seems curiously dated, and shot through, as well, with an odd, almost childishly callous indifference. No wars ever intruded, but one's friends did, though always pleasantly, and so you get a long series of portraits and picnics, all as ivory-towerish in feeling as anything you ever saw. It must be said, however, that within her framework of ideas Miss Stettheimer functioned, as an artist, almost perfectly. She had a quirky wit, which at times—as in the portrait of Marcel Duchamp whirling himself up to the sky on a kind of celestial piano stool—could be thoroughly engaging, and her painting style, with its mixture of the naïve and the elaborately sophisticated, was admirably fitted to her purpose. Her best pictures are her last, and in such paintings as the big “Cathedrals of Broadway” (which, among other things, is a kind of apotheosis of Jimmy Walker), “Cathedrals of Art,” and “Family Portrait,” she shows a skill in organization and an adroitness in approach that make them delightful.

ROBERT M. COLE · NEW YORK