"Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s," Archive What's Right With This Picture? The New York Times BY WILLIAM L. HAMILTON Published: Thursday, April 5, 2001 SOME distant day, anthropologists may discover what was surely the tribal art of 20th-century American suburbia: paint-by-number paintings. As quickly as you could become a writer by corresponding with the Famous Writers School, lose weight without exercising, own sea horses or a monkey the size of a teacup, you could be a successful artist by completing a blue-printed numbered canvas, color-coded to tiny pots of paint. The clowns, kittens, ballerinas, cowboys, New England landscapes, Pacific seascapes and Parisian cityscapes rendered by the ubiquitous hobbyists of the 1950's coincided with the dawn of tract-home civilization. Fifty years later, they aIready seem as remarkable as Lascaux. You just have to stumble across a cave of them. "O.K.," said Trey Speegle, sounding the roll call. "Jesuses, Sacred Hearts, Marys." Mr. Speegle, like a Vatican guide with a group behind him, marched down the stairs on the last leg of a tour of his four-story l9th-century town house in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. The stairway hoIds the bulk of Mr. Speegle's collection of roughly 500 paint-by-number paintings, hung according to subject or genre. The masterpieces-Mona Lisa, which he paid 165 big bucks for; the Gainsboroughs, Blue Boy and Lady Innes (aka Pinky in paint-by-number circles); Ingres's odalisque are the cream at the top of the stairs. "I know; it's ridiculous," said Mr. Speegle, the creative director of YM magazine, grabbing the offense. Not on the premises are 20 large works Mr. Speegle lent to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History for "Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950's'" an exhibition opening tomorrow in Washington. The show, on view through Dec. 3l, is the first full accounting of the popular pastime since 1992, when the Bridgewater Lustberg Gallery in New York put on display the collection of the late Michael O'Donoghue, a writer for "Saturday Night Live." "I can remember them as the decorative condition of the neighborhood I grew up in," said William L. Bird Jr., the Smithsonian exhibition's curator, who grew up in suburban Washington. "They were a perfect match with people who aspired to own their own home-the ultimate achievement of do-it-yourself." Mr. Bird, whose parents took him at age 12 to see the "Mona Lisa" behind bullet proof glass at the National Gallery of Art in 1963, recalled returning to his house and seeing the framed Utrillos in the basement recreation room with new appreciation. The paint-by-number concept was the work of two men: Dan Robbins, an artist who worked for the auto industry, and Max Klein, who manufactured paint. It's fitting it happened in Detroit, Mr. Bird said. "If General Motors had made art, this would have been it." Mr. Robbins remembered that Leonardo da Vinci had left numbered sections of paintings for assistants to fill in. In 1952, he brought the idea to Mr. Klein, the owner of the Palmer Show Card Paint Company, his new employer. Mr. Klein saw potential in marketing fail-safe artists' kits, in part because of the celebrity of Sunday painters like President Eisenhower and Winston Churchill. But he disliked Mr. Robbins's first proposed painting, "Abstract No. 1," a still-life that was "part Picasso, part Braque and a lot of Robbins," said Mr. Robbins, 76, now an artist living in Oakbrook, IL. His latest commission is an outdoor banner for the Smithsonian exhibition-an 18-by-28-foot paint-by-number lighthouse painted by number this week by two museum employees in a cherry picker. "Mr. Klein placed his bets instead on the postcard scenes and calendar art of barns in Maine, and fair-faced collies, pigtailed Indian princesses and coolies in China-the pictures that America saw and smiled at when it closed its eyes to the realities of a nuclear age, urban sprawl and a growing multiculturalism. And masterpieces: though 90 percent of the art was original, reproductions like da Vinci's "Last Supper" were best-sellers. "Once we'd launched, we were besieged with requests from customers, "Mr. Robbins said. "We took our lead from the letters from customers. We were getting our research right from the horse's mouth." By 1953, 30 companies were manufacturing paint-by-number sets, which typically sold for $2.50, with palettes that included up to 90 colors. Art departments modeled on cartoon animation units at studios like Disney specialized in subjects like pets or religious studies, generating thousands of images. Sales for the industry that year topped $80 million. "Actors act in plays written by somebody else," Mr. Robbins said. "Singers cover songs. This is just an artistic version of singalong." What made paint-by-number painting so popular? "You didn't have to make any decisions, about what the colors should be or what to paint," said Mr. Speegle, who, despite his impressive holdings, has never tried his hand at one. "It was relaxing. Then you could frame it and hang it on your wall and look at it. "Mr. Speegle was standing next to an "out of control kitty" as he described a small animal portrait expressionistically executed by someone who clearly had trouble relaxing. The prevailing wisdom of the postwar period was that art enhanced the quality of life. "An artitic home means more enjoyable living" wrote Janet K. Smith in 1949 in the Journal of Home Economics. Even the White House during Eisenhower's administration installed a gallery of paint-by-number paintings in the West Wing in 1954. It included pictures completed by Nelson Rockefeller Ethel Merman and J. Edgar Hoover (a prim Swiss village blocked in with a marksman's precision). Paint-by-number paintings betrayed America's belief that the production of art could be domesticated like anything else from a paper-trained puppy to the perfect lawn. The paintings, entered in local art contests, took prizes, which sent critics into full howI. "Why were they so afraid of a housewife who picked up a paintbrush for the first time?" Mr. Bird asked. "One thing you have to know about it-it's not art." June Mersky, a Boston collector, who also lent pieces to the Smithsonian show, would disagree. "They're folk art," said Ms. Mersky, who is down to 650 paintings (she just sold 50. "They're not cookie-cutter. People did artistically what they wanted with them. It was tedious, done by hand, not machine." Unlike Mr. Speegle, who was bequeathed his first big batch by another collector, and who appears to have adopted the attitude that the rest slipped into the house one day when he forgot to lock the door, Ms. Mersky loves her paint-by-number paintings. "They're my gems; I adore them," she said, though she added, "My husband's ready to sell the house just to get rid of them." Her favorite is a selfportrait by Madame Vigee-Lebrun. The "other one" hangs in the Louvre. She also has two Maillols that "would hold up in a mansion as the real thing," she said an interesting thought. Ms. Mersky has painted by number herself. "A little cabin in the woods," she recalled. "I think I did a good job on it. I was 10." The hobby and its by-products, in fact, bring out a generation of memories for those who grew up in the 1950's, which lends a powerful appeal to them as collectibles. Dr. Larry Rubin, a psychologist in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., decorated the waiting room of his office with his collection. Dr. Rubin owns 250. "I'm a small-time collector," he said. For Dr. Rubin's patients, the paintings are picture windows into the past. "People started offering fascinating tidbits about themselves, or their families," he recalled, "insights that I don't think I could have gotten so easily in therapy tearful reminiscences about watching their fathers doing these, or the family at Christmastime." Though the kits are still produced, by the late 1950's the bloom was off the rose-all 10 carefully parceled colors of it. "Television displaced paint-by-number as the visual experience in the home," Mr. Bird said. Mr. Speegle, standing by a wall of "Oriental" themes at the foot of his Brooklyn stairway, said he thought that people were fond of paint-by-number paintings as faded emblems of a pre-ironic America. What was naive art is now deadpan collecting. Mr. Speegle's curios include a bounced check written by Courtney Love; a pair of unworn, monogrammed pajamas tailored for Ray Bolger; a stuffed cat curied on a pillow by a fireplace; and a tennis shoe signed by Andy Warhol. The artist - deadpan's patron saint - also did a series of paint-by-number paintings in the 1960's: the numbers were placed over the paint. Mr. Speegle, a recovering pack rat, who says he no longer buys, still checks in with eBay online for paintings. The heydays of thrift-shop shopping and flea-marketing are largely over. It is a field still finding its criteria some pay for precision, others for painterly license - but prices, which vary wildly, usually stay below $100. There are rarities, too, like unpainted canvases or unused boxed sets, and there are paintings that remain rumors. Mr. Speegle has a grail the queen of England, Elizabeth II, produced by Palmer in 1953 as an export for Canada. "I've only ever seen it in pictures," he said. How high would he go? Five hundred? "Oh good God no," Mr. Speegle excIaimed nervously. "That's a lot of money. I'm not that interested in them." The vista up the stairs was painted by number as far as the eye could see. "Maybe $200 - at the most," he said. Copyright 2001, The New York Times. Photo of June Mersky by Jared Leeds for The New York Times. Photos of Speegle stairway by Antoine Bootz for The New York Times. Photo of J. Edgar Hoover painting by Neal Boenzi for The New York Times Back to Smithsonian Articles