There is also a class of painters who can best be described as able and honest. At the head of these artists stands Mr. Peyraud and Edward B. Butler. There are also Frank V. Dudley, H. Leon Roecker, Edgar S. Cameron, J. H. Carlsen, Lawton Parker, Charles Francis Brown, A. H. Schmidt, William Wendt, Alfred Jansson, Alson Clark, Karl A. Buehr, Grace Ravlin, Edgar Payne and the following portrait painters: our own Franz Hals, Mr. Christian Abrahamsen, Oscar Gross, Gordon Stevensen, Cecil Clark Davis and Arvid Nieholm.
Mr. Werner’s mannerism is too monotonous.
Mr. Ufers and Mr. Higgins have taken yellow ochre into the open and made good use of it. I have taken these two men separately because both have done good work and I expect much improvement in the near future. Their work at present looks too much like illustrations. Miss Dorothy Loeb is the only one who has a real sense of rhythm in line.
The Chicago Society of Artists, which runs this exhibition every year, seems to be controlled at present by a number of men who have inherited a long-discarded weak imitation of a technique once used by Segantini. They have excluded almost everything that showed some originality and feeling, but have accepted and hung a few very poor and meaningless things, so that they may shine by contrast. However, it seems to me they are at the end of the rope. The public refuses to buy the dope and their best men have sent in nothing to this show. I refer to Clarkson, Reynolds, Betts, Oliver Dennet Grover, Henderson, Rittman; and Lawton Parker has only one little canvas.
A Vers Libre Prize Contest
Through the generosity of a friend, The Little Review is enabled to offer an unusual prize for poetry—possibly the first prize extended to free verse. The giver is “interested in all experiments, and has followed the poetry published in The Little Review with keen appreciation and a growing admiration for the poetic form known as vers libre.”
The conditions are as follows:
Contributions must be received by April 15th.
They must not be longer than twenty-five lines.
They must be sent anonymously with stamps for return.