Word: kantor
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...Morris Kantor, whose horsy, Old Testament head is one of the longest on the faculty of Manhattan's Art Students' League, has been a respected U. S. painter for about ten years. Few people were prepared, however, to find his roomful of canvases at the Rehn Galleries the most satisfying in the city, not excluding the big Whitney Museum annual of contemporary U. S. painting...
...Kantor's style, still evolving, owes a debt to surrealism but is quite distinct from it. "The surrealists paint fantasy realistically," he said last week, "but I try to paint real things fantastically-with imagination." After many experiments in technique and studies in arts as diverse as daguerreotype and Early American furniture, he has begun to get a simple finality of design and great subtlety of "surface...
...painter starts with a piece of canvas and literally builds his picture on it. Kantor builds with virtuosity, his favorite brush stroke a kind of scallop, his favorite atmospheric greys and browns full of warm or cold shine from the color elements in them. His compositions are sometimes epigrams in paint: a lighthouse stout and stark on a green hill crest with telephone poles slanting one way on one side, the other way on the other, as if in a tug of war that keeps the lighthouse rigid...
...painful lore of the passenger pigeons deserves a poet but has attracted MacKinlay Kantor. The Noise of Their Wings, laid in Florida of 1937, revolves around the obsession of an aged millionaire, who hankers for a living pair of passenger pigeons. The main role, however, devolves on the millionaire's old friend, an ornithologist, who is Author Kantor's poetic mouthpiece. In a series of melodramatic disasters which involve half the main characters, as well as all the pigeons, the ornithologist is everywhere at once, confirming his mystical foreboding that no good can come of the millionaire...
...Author Kantor's story is teasing and ingenious rather than effective. As in his Civil War novels (Long Remember, Arouse and Beware, etc.), MacKinlay Kantor has a graphic sense of the U. S. past, writes good descriptive narrative, and creates an atmosphere of tension. But in The Noise of Their Wings he goes lame shuttling between the past and present, and most of his vitality appears to have been exhausted in devising a modern plot. The characters in The Noise of Their Wings resemble real people about as closely as the Smithsonian's well-stuffed passenger pigeon resembles...