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Show who's t-JEVS I THIS WEEK... By Lemuel F. Parton NEW YORK. It seems possible that Rockefeller Center was trying for a delicate cultural balance bal-ance in getting three alien artisis to do its murals. Right, Left Right, left and and Center center, in the or-Represented or-Represented der named, Jose Maria Sert, Diego Rivera and Frank Brangwyn, were the muralists. There was an inevitable clash, and now, after five years, a compromise. compro-mise. Lenin's head, by the hard-boiled, hard-boiled, hard-bitten Mexican Rivera, blocked out in 1934, has been replaced re-placed by a conventional mural by the Spanish Sr. Sert, with the orthodox ortho-dox theme of America's continuing development along the old lines. The compromise appears in Sr. Serfs restrained sepia monochrome, instead in-stead of his usual lavish outpouring of gold and scarlet, verdant green and ecstatic blue. Sr. Sert is the most millionairish of all living painters. Here he pipes down. If we didn't go left with Lenin, Len-in, our new era isn't going to be as gaudy as the last one. It will be a sober, industrious, thrifty, monochrome age, with no more high kicking and low thinking. think-ing. That seems to be what Sr. Sert and the Rockefeller Center people are saying. When the big, booming, sixty-one-year-old Spanish painter is going strong, he makes Vernonese just a wet wash with a touch of bluing. He was a regular stand-by and emergency painter for his friend, King Alfonso. "Con mucho gusto," he can swing the whole spectrum, with bold, regal effects which are the delight of kings. He has done many magnificent rooms in Europe, including the Madrid Ma-drid chapel of the duke of Alba, now Franco's commercial envoy to England, and Sir Phillip Sassoon's resplendent ballrooms. His first exhibition in this country was in 1924, when he received prolonged critical salvos. He was born in Barcelona of the ancient Spanish gentry, and studied in Paris in his Sert Swings early youth. Spectrum From the first, With Gusto he developed boldness bold-ness and exuberance, exuber-ance, both in color and technique. Briffault's pre-war Europe which was to have gone on forever, but didn't knew him for its very own. His new monochrome fits an age "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." In the current argument between government and business, it is interesting in-teresting to note that the temple of business gets back to the Muses and the classical symbols of work and labor, after its brief leftward deviation in 1933. In Washington, such bold innovators as Henry Var-num Var-num Poor and George Biddle still state tortuous new themes in the government murals. But there's not so much splash in those Rockefeller Center murals as there might have been in, say, 192B. YOUNG BURGESS MEREDITH, at the age of twenty-eight, is picked to run Actors Equity association, associa-tion, for a time at least. A star on Broadway, a coun-Meredith coun-Meredith try squire, a Hol- Was Tossed lywood success, on Upgrade he has had more tossing around than a roller-coaster addict, with the up-grade all in the depression years. In Lakewood, a suburb of Cleveland, Cleve-land, his father was a doctor and his grandfather an evangelist. His Uncle Joe, whom he greatly admired, ad-mired, was in vaudeville. He washed dishes and tended furnaces fur-naces during one sad and lonely year at Amherst, ran a haberdashery haberdash-ery shop with his brother in Cleveland, Cleve-land, went bankrupt, was a reporter on the Stamford Advocate, until they caught him at it, sold roofing, vacuum cleaners and cosmetics, worked in Macy's department store, sang in church choirs for $4 a Sunday, Sun-day, lived a week on breakfast food samples, and was for a time one of the migrant army of jobless youth. Tha fionroccinn Krmicht him Inrlc. - - " . , In 1929, he got a letter of introduction introduc-tion to Eva le Gallienne and a pay-less pay-less job as an apprentice actor. His climb was slow. Depression He first attained Was Really high visibility in Lady Luck "she Loves Me Not," in 1933. He cinched his gains in his three Maxwell Max-well Anderson plays, "Winterset," "High Tor," and "Star Wagon." His estate is near that of Mr. Anderson An-derson in Rockland county, New York, where he is very busy with house-building, dogs, and books. He has an eager, avid mind, buzzing with new ideas. He is a faithful intellectual understudy under-study of the older Mr. Anderson and his genius chimes in perfectly with Mr. Anderson's exalted blank verse dramaturgy. He is five feet, seven inches tall, weighs 135 pounds and is no matinee idol listed briefly at booking agency as "blond and homely" when he first went after a job in the theater. His wife is the distinguished distin-guished actress. iIjrg;uei Perry. Conso:! N'c'.vt. p f .ttii. ts. V. N .; 5": ..l;. |