Artists' Rations

Painters, like other businessmen, now face priorities. Foreseeing virtual confiscation of certain key materials like titanium white, cadmium and chromium pigments, Manhattan's American Artists' Professional League (2,200 members) recently petitioned Washington for cooperation in keeping artists supplied with their annual ration of paint (about a gallon apiece). For some 35,000 U.S. citizens who make their living painting pictures that gallon of paint is a necessity.

The U.S. paint, canvas and brush situation:

Canvas, always imported for U.S. artists from Ireland and Belgium, is the biggest problem. With Belgian linen cut off, prices of first-class material are up nearly 300%, and most artists are making shift with domestic cotton substitutes. (The U.S. does not grow the right kind of flax for high-grade linen canvas.) Some artists are experimenting with beaverboard, shirt cardboard, many building-board substitutes (like Masonite).

Brushes made from soft Russian sable bristles are plentiful. But stiff German-dressed South American ox bristles and "camel hair" (obtained not from camels but from Russian squirrels) are practically unobtainable.

White lead: No shortage as yet; no price rise.

Zinc White: Supply reduced by 7 to 20% of normal production; prices up 20%.

Cadmium paints (pale yellow to deep red): Prices, though protected by a Government ceiling, up 16 to 20%.

Ochres & Sienas (formerly imported, now domestically produced in insufficient quantities): Prices up 15 to 25%.

U.S. artists have already begun hoarding against impending shortages. Most practical plan for saving at the production end was one advanced by the American Artists' Professional League: to economize on variety by reducing the artist's palette from a possible maximum of 400 colors to 13 basic pigments.*

Sculptors at first were smug: no one expects a shortage in stone, wood or plaster. But last fortnight they got a jolt: a Government order specifying that after Jan. 1 U.S. foundries could cast no more sculpture in bronze.

* White, cadmium yellow (light and medium), cadmium red, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, cerulean blue, viridian green (chromium compound), alizarin crimson and four earth colors.

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