American Painter - Henry Billings

A PAINTER BORN IN A WELL-TO-DO FAMILY often has a harder time of it than his poorer brethren. If father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were physicians, lawyers, or JL business men and properly educated in the best of universities, then of course the son must not break that family tradition. And if there happens never to have been a painter in the family, so much the worse for the unfortunate son who happens to be bom with the creative urge. This creative urge becomes an unheard-of thing, and there is a great clan horrified at the strange carryings on of a beloved son.

There was something of all this in the early life of Henry Billings, son of Dr. John Sedgwick Billings and grandson of John Shaw Billings, famous bibliographer of medicine, designer of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and first direaor of the New York Public Library. After only a few years of formal education that terminated when he was seventeen, in what he describes as "general confusion," the artist served a short apprenticeship in various architectural offices. But he soon left to study at the Art Students' League, a decision which he says was "an appalling choice from the family's point of view, inasmuch as I obviously had no ulent."

At the League he studied with Boardman Robinson and Kermeth Hayes Miller on and off for about three years. Then, in 1921, he went to Woodstock. There at first he had a hard time of it, spending one winter alone in a small studio shack, living on $25 a month, and refusing to ask his family for more. There, for ten years as an art student, he absorbed and watched the influence of what is genetically called modem French art. While learning the discipline of abstract painting he became deeply interested in the possibility of using machine forms as a basis for mural decorations, in keeping with the new developments in modem architecture.

At the same time he felt the need, he says, "of breaking our academic bondage to the still-life, the iminhabited landscape and the studio nude. This interest in subject matter, whether it results in studies of the American Scene or Surrealism, or what have you, is indicative of the feeling on the part of most painters that the easel picture must be recharged with vital content."

Billings gave his first one-man show in 1928, and three years later held another exhibition of decorative panels, the designs of which were based on machinery. Five of these panels were acquired by New York's Museum of Science and Industry. Later he was commissioned to paint murals for the Music Hall in Radio City, and these were followed by two mural commissions from the Treasury Department for post offices in Lake Placid, N.Y., and Medford, Mass.

For the Ford Building at the New York World's Fair he designed a 40-foot mobile mural, probably the only mural in the world in which actual parts of machinery revolve and move. Although his mural projects have taken a great part of his time, Billings is continuing easel painting. One of his earlier canvases is owned by the Whimey Museum of American Art. His Arrest No. z is witness to his keen interest in the social problems of his fellow men, and his awareness of the life about him.