Word: souchon
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While a guest sits comfortably in an easy chair sipping a drink, the open door of the secretary's office, lighted with artificial daylight, serves as a stage. At Dr. Souchon's command a Negro servant places one picture at a time on a big easel, leaves it there until an imperious click from a mechanical cricket in the doctor's hand signals for its removal. Meanwhile Dr. Souchon's secretary takes down in shorthand even the most irresponsible remarks the visitor makes. Painter Souchon, who enjoys showing his pictures almost as much as he does...
Last week incorrigibly paint-minded Oldster Souchon finished his 500th canvas. "I must hurry up," said he, "because I'm living now on the velvet of my life." Like many another Souchon, No. 500 depicted a tropically lush imaginary scene, in which flat, doll-like figures galloped and swayed through a high-pitched bedlam of clangorous color. When the last brush strokes had dried, he carefully stored it away in his files of similarly exuberant Souchons: Van Gogh-like pictures of hot, shadowless Louisiana cornfields, quaint, warm-colored, old-worldly interiors, and fanciful, childlike coloristic riots like The Farm...
...wealth, affable and loquacious Dr. Souchon sells few of his pictures because he doesn't want to compete unfairly with fellow artists who have to make a living with paint. But occasionally some art lover manages to talk him into a sale. He chortles: "If any damn fool wants to pay $500, all right!" Because the art world has not yet crowed much over the effusive, highly personal charm of his work, his exhibitions have been few. For this lack, Surgeon Souchon makes up by holding private showings himself in the mahogany-brown library of his office suite...
Descendant of an old French Louisiana family, and son of a doctor father, Marion Sims Souchon took a long time getting around to painting. His first hobby was history. When he had become something of an authority on Napoleon, he started to collect cacti. When air conditioning wrecked his indoor plantation, Surgeon Souchon decided that painting might be more fun, bought himself a set of paints and went to work...
...first pictures, done in what he calls "Brown-gravy classical" style, were conventional, imitative, trite. In 1935 an exhibition of them brought a royal roasting from New Orleans critics. So Painter Souchon changed his style. Turning his back on all the art-school rules, Oldster Souchon picked up his brightest paint tubes, let himself go. Before he knew it, he got so involved in color that his son and assistant, Dr. Edmond Souchon, had to take over most of his practice...