Word: verts
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Some of his more sobersided fellow artists deplore Marcel Vertès. They sneer at his "commercialism" (he does covers for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, along with book illustrations, perfume ads, ballet sets, china, furniture, silk print and needlepoint designs), but can't help envying his commercial success. They scoff at his preference for pretty and elegant subjects, but have to admit, gritting their teeth, that Vertes (rhymes with bear says) draws and paints very prettily and elegantly indeed. They call him superficial, forget that such masters as Fragonard were...
Moreover, Vertès bubbles with ideas that other artists wish they had thought of first. Last week a Manhattan gallery put the results of Vertès' latest notion on show: 20 portraits of famous people painted as Vertes imagines they must have looked in childhood. Most of them pretty and all more or less penetrating, the portraits were done with a feather-light virtuoso touch reminiscent of Manet. The drawing was sketchy but never scratchy, the colors pastel but never pasty...
...Little Mouth. The artist began the series eight months ago with a picture of his wife as a little girl. "It's nice," their friends said, "but you could never paint one of a bearded man as a boy." Vertès accepted the challenge, sat down to paint a juvenile Bernard Shaw. "When an Englishman or an Irishman has a beard," he figured, "there must be a reason. I looked very well at grown-up photographs of Shaw, and I found his bad little mouth and sharp little chin. I painted him at the age of twelve...
...project grew on Vertès as he worked: "I happened to be reading Mrs. Roosevelt's autobiography. She wrote she was a sad little child, so I painted her that way. Then somebody said, 'Why don't you paint Einstein with his little violin?', and that was enough. Churchill was obvious. He said himself that every baby in the United Kingdom looked like him. Garbo I imagined as a pale green little girlbeautiful always, but I'm sure she was green as a frog. I'd seen so many photographs...
Polite Little Smile. One of the most charming portraits in the show is of a beautiful five-year-old in a sailor suit, meant to be Vertès himself. At 55, he looks like a heavy-set Mephisto, whose brow, nose and mouth form three emphatic Vs. "My friends," Vertès admits, "smile a little at my self-portrait and say very politely, 'I don't think it's too much...