Art: Forain

Two Manhattan art galleries held memorial exhibitions last week for a man who died in Paris five months ago in his 80th year: Jean-Louis Forain, biting satirist, master of etching and lithography, one of the greatest ecclesiastical artists since Rembrandt, one of the last giants of the 19th Century (TIME, July 20).

His father was a house painter, but young Jean-Louis refused to paint houses, refused to go to school. He played hooky to copy old masters in the Louvre. Degas took him up. After the Franco-German War Forain's cartoons suddenly caught on. From then until his death he was an established success.

Jean-Louis Forain was a great hater.

Almost everyone has seen one of his series of the French law courts with lawyers and judges looking like vultures in their black robes. All the critics who kotowed in Forain's honor this summer recalled these as well as the great series of etchings of the life of Christ he made about 1910. Few of them recalled that he was a violent Jew-baiter, that during the days of the Dreyfus case he helped found the anti-Semitic paper Psst. He was little remembered for the vicious propaganda pictures he drew during the Franco-German and World Wars. In New York last week the Caz-Delbo Galleries had an important showing of his paintings and water colors under the auspices of the French Government. At the Knoedler Galleries was a special exhibition of Forain's etchings and lithographs.