Husband & Wife

It takes unusual merit or a great reputation to draw the average Manhattan art critic from his comfortable daily beat up & down the smart art marts of 57th Street. Most of these choosy journalists were down under the Elevated last week picking their way among the packing cases and fruit stands of Greenwich Village. Alexander Brook was having another exhibition at the Downtown Gallery.

A hulking, baldish, good-natured young man with the nose and neck of a Roman Senator, Artist Brook is no stranger to the galleries. For more than a decade he has been giving shows, winning medals, selling pictures to museums. In 1931 the Whitney Museum gave him its official accolade by publishing a monograph on his work. In Philadelphia last week the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts was pleased to hang some of his canvases in its 129th annual show. In the Manhattan show were 22 more Brook landscapes, figures, portraits.

Highlight of the exhibition was a cool grey-green canvas, square at the end of the gallery, called Summer Wind. Many critics hailed it as the most effective nude of the season, not excluding Eugene Speicher's magnificently painted figures at the Rehn Galleries (TIME, Jan. 22). Artist Brook's good friend Critic Edward Alden Jewell of the Times went further, called it "a particularly arresting embodiment of youth, animated by the sort of resilient 'lift' that sculptors know as the Greek inhalation." Alex Brook's paintings are no longer for amateur collectors. Admirers of resilient lift and Greek inhalation will have to pay $1,800 for Summer Wind.

The two best portraits in the show were of Mrs. Peggy Bacon Brook. Very much an artist in her own right, dynamic, sharp-nosed Peggy Bacon is a famed U. S. caricaturist with a sly habit of ridiculing herself more savagely than any of her sitters. Her verse has a dagger-like point that wounds and wins. Always the gentleman, Husband Brook endows his wife's portraits with polite dignity and even a certain beauty.

In arty Woodstock, N.Y. where the Bacon-Brook family used to summer before they moved to Cross River, N.Y., oldtimers remember them as The Couple Who Kept the Baby With the Rattlesnake. This is not the exact story. Husband Brook and Wife Bacon were in the habit of parking their healthy young son Sandy in a small pen at the edge of the woods while they pursued art. One hot morning a fat rattler came down the mountain "walking to water," slithered into the pen. No more frightened than the infant Hercules, Baby Sandy went on playing until Alex Brook passed by, saw the snake, snatched up his child with one sweep, killed the snake with another.

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