New Spaniard

Manhattan's 57th St. last week turned up an almost unheard-of Spanish painter, Arturo Souto, a solemn, round-bellied Galician. Unlike most celebrated modern Spanish artists (Picasso, Miro, Dali, Gris, et al.) Painter Souto has done most of his painting away from Paris. His heavily stippled, somber-colored paintings of street scenes and peasant figures look conservative alongside the geometric and psychopathic fantasies of his more famed countrymen. But his 'work is agreeably realistic and dourly, muddily individual.

Souto was born in 1902 in the northwest Spanish town of Pontevedra (pop. 28,755). His father, a painter of Corot-like landscapes, was also a magistrate and enough of an Anglophile to name his son Arturo, after King Arthur of the Round Table. Taught painting by his father, at 21 he went to Paris, where he studied, haunted the galleries, became a fervent admirer of Delacroix and Rouault. He decided that the modernistic Ecole de Paris was not for him. Said he: "A painting, for me, must be based on human emotion. It is a deep experience. In the School of Paris there is much talent, but the work is of the mind purely. Picasso is a gifted encyclopedia. He goes through everything just like a child. But his work is something which is entirely apart from art."

Back in his native Spain, Souto found his best inspiration in the old Spanish masters Goya, El Greco, Velasquez. In 1934 the Spanish Republican Government gave him a Prix de Rome, which lasted him until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. A Loyalist who had a brother in Franco's ranks, Souto didn't enjoy the war much. Two months before it was over he left for Paris and Brussels, drifted later to the U.S. Exiled and running low on funds in Manhattan, Souto was lucky enough to get friends to stake him to last week's exhibition expenses, persuaded Knoedler's swank 57th Street Gallery to hang his pictures on speculation. By week's end neither his friends nor Knoedler's were disappointed. In the first five days of the exhibition Arturo Souto, had sold twelve paintings, (at $75 to $500), one of them to Frank Jewett Mather Jr., famed art critic and onetime Princeton professor.

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