Word: brangwyn
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Died. Sir Frank Brangwyn, 89, British mural painter, longtime mainstay of Britain's Royal Academy, best known in the U.S. for his sepia-and-white, archacademic panels (New Frontiers) in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center (R.C.A. Building lobby); in Ditchling, England. Because he always hated having his works "pawed over by a lot of strangers," Sir Frank gave away some half million dollars' worth to friends and fans. Others are pawed over in: the Canadian Parliament Building (Ottawa), London's Royal Exchange Building, the Cleveland Court House, Missouri's capitol building, the civic center in Swansea...
...good reason why artists are notoriously impecunious is that pictures are notoriously hard to sell. Last week a venerable, famed (and comfortably off) British artist announced that he had found a way out: he gives his pictures away. As a solver of financial problems, Sir Frank Brangwyn seemed to fellow artists reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's White Knight, who thought up a scheme "to keep the Menai Bridge from rust by boiling it in wine...
Seventy-six-year-old Artist Brangwyn has already, said he, disposed of some $500,000 worth of his art. Most Brangwyn gifts have gone quietly to friends and fans, because he hates having his work "pawed over by a lot of strangers...
Long a mainstay of Britain's ultraconservative Royal Academy, Artist Brangwyn is best known in the U.S. for his arch-academic murals in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center (R.C.A. Building's lobby). Sir Frank once fell afoul of British womanhood when he was misreported as having criticized the British female figure. What he actually said: "An Eve-I want an Eve. Where is there an Eve symbolic of her sex?" Result: a mass demonstration of shapely women in the streets of his native village (Ditchling, Sussex...
...such fictioneers as Blasco Ibanez, E. M. Hull, Arthur Somers Roche and Somerset Maugham were as exotically escapist as the tales themselves, and his studio became famous for its clutter of authentic props. In 1922 tall, enthusiastic, travel-loving Artist Cornwell went to London to work with Frank Brangwyn, has since incorporated that decorator's style with his own in some of the most splendiferous symbolic murals in the Western Hemisphere-one in the Los Angeles Public Library and one now being finished for the General Motors Building at the World's Fair...