Fresh Canvas for Mickey

Mickey Walker, the "Toy Bulldog," used to be famed for the wicked left hook that made him middleweight and welterweight king of the '20s. Now he has shifted hands, changed to a gaudy right. The old master has become an artist, a painter of genuine oil paintings.

Mickey's first (and presumably last) one-man show was held last week in Manhattan. On display were 15 canvases that one anonymous critic called "a new kind of primitive--there's never been nothing like them before." Mickey painted them after hours in his Elizabeth, NJ. saloon. All are for sale at suitably artistic prices: $1,500 and up. Sales to date: 0.

Mickey discovered his gift a year and a half ago, seven years after quitting the ring. Someone had sold him a bad painting of a clipper ship and it disturbed him. He tinkered with it. After six months he had changed it into a steamboat. Then he saw a movie, The Moon and Sixpence--Somerset Maugham's story about Paul Gauguin. Next day Mickey bought an easel, a palette and a fistful of brushes.

Most of Mickey's oils are landscapes which suggest that he might have painted them while wearing boxing gloves. Ten and Out is his only treatment of the fight game. The New York Herald Tribune's hulking sports editor Stanley Woodward went to Mickey's show, commented: "The clientele stood around drinking Martinis and Manhattans, talking fights, submitting to radio broadcasts and newsreels, yet, withal, keeping their minds open in case anyone should mention art." Tony Galento, twice licked by a fighter whose first name was Art, managed after 80 minutes' rehearsal to garble the following prepared opinion: "The perspective is distorted and the subordination of technic to composition is indubitably fatuous." The event was an acknowledged knockout for the editors of Click, who arranged it.

Mickey, who will paint his third mother-in-law washing dishes as soon as he can talk her into posing, remained above criticism. He said he did not care whether any canvases were ever sold, that he painted because he liked to.

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