Exhibit May Prove That These Paintings Really Count

The national seal of approval has just been stamped on one of the most likable fads of the ‘50s. An exhibit opened today at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History on the phenomenon of paint by number.

Entitled “Painting by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s,” the exhibit makes no reference to the tragic loss of one reporter’s critically acclaimed portraits of Ringling Bros. clown Emmett Kelly.

But obviously not every mother threw out her offspring’s assembly-line masterpieces.

On the phone from Washington, D.C., curator William L. Bird Jr. explains that he had no trouble finding 40 choice examples of the genre for the exhibition and many more for the catalog and book he wrote, “Paint by Number: The How-to Craze that Swept the Nation.” He never bothered to seek out collectors west of Chicago because he found so many east of Chicago.

That anyone collects completed paint-by-number paintings often comes as a shock to people who don’t. Antiques dealer Jessica LaMar, who has space at the Cranberry House in Studio City, remembers being astonished the first time she saw a painting of a lighthouse, or kittens with a ball of yarn, come into the store and sell for $50 or more.

“I had no clue there was a market for them,” she says.

But now a passion for paint by number seems no stranger to her than a hunger for lunch boxes featuring the Monkees or the Partridge Family.

“It’s like every collectible,” she says. “People relate it to their childhood. People remember doing it. It just brings them back home.”

Paintings May Increase in Value

In light of the Smithsonian show, LaMar says she’s sorry she doesn’t have a local paint-by-number collector in her Rolodex. She’d love to call the person to report that his or her collection just tripled in value.

Forty-one-year-old Mike Tauber, an artist in Laguna Beach, is just such a collector. A fan of the sets as a child, the adult Tauber acquired his first example in the 1980s when he inherited the furnishings of an apartment his brother had decorated in classic thrift shop.

Tauber liked the colors of the paint-by-number canvases so much that he hung them in his studio to refer to while working on his own paintings.

Today he has more than 200 examples, none of which cost him more than $65. His favorites include an endearingly grotesque nude; an early version of “The Old Mill,” a classic scene by paint-by-number inventor Dan Robbins; and a set of four bull-fighting scenes that have a surrealistic quality and remind him of the work of Jasper Johns.

Tauber praises paint-by-number acquisition as “an inexpensive way to collect original artwork.” Original? Yes, Tauber insists. No two finished paintings are exactly alike. Each may have started out as an identical pattern--the same stamped-on shapes with a number inside to indicate the mandated paint color. But everyone who did a painting inevitably left his or her distinctive mark.

Sometimes the seascape has been done in a shaky hand; sometimes, Tauber says, the paintings are “almost anal retentive, they’re so precise.” Sometimes people forget to color something in, or chose not to. Sometimes the painter ignored directions and opted for an original color palette. Sometimes the painter continued the painting, without benefit of numbers, onto the frame.

“They are so much more complex than they initially appear,” says Tauber. He savors their shameless commercialism--something that drove ‘50s art critics crazy--their absurdist humor, and the way the scent of a newly opened set catapults you back to childhood.

“For me, it captures a more naive or innocent time, when you could entertain yourself simply by coloring in this picture,” Tauber says.

Other collectors are also given to thoughtful musing. Larry Rubin, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., publishes the field’s newsletter, Larry’s By the Numbers. His “Journey Thru Space” is in the Smithsonian show. Many of his 250 other pieces are in the office where he sees patients in his psychotherapy practice.

Rubin says the paintings often trigger spontaneous comments from patients that are invaluable in treating them. When someone looks at a paint-by-number seascape, then announces it reminds him of his father, who had done a similar one, which the patient hated because his father was so unloving and remote--well, as Rubin puts it, “How can you not use that kind of information?”

‘Last Supper’ Owners Surveyed

Recently, Rubin and a theologian friend surveyed two dozen people who own paint-by-number versions of “The Last Supper”--one of the most popular sets. Rubin asked how the painting was displayed and its spiritual implications for the owners. Rubin and his collaborator hope to publish such findings as the discovery that some owners use it as the center of an in-home altar, while others have hung it in the dining room to give a sacramental quality to family meals.

On a more mundane plane, exhibit curator Bird recalls that he never did a paint-by-number set as a child: “I didn’t have the patience.” Bird has a doctorate in history from Georgetown University, but claims his art education ended at Art 101.

“I have no art background,” he says, “which probably qualifies me for curating this show.”

Not long after the fad took off in 1951, it was denounced in the pages of such Establishment journals as American Artist, Bird says. There the word moron was used to characterize people who completed sets and displayed their cookie-cutter art.

Bird and others claim the craze was linked to the suburbanization of the United States in the wake of World War II and the subsequent rise of hobbyism: The show includes a large photomural of the prototypical American suburb--Levittown.

Without denying that paint by number is kitsch, Bird points out that many of the people who proudly hung their hand-painted versions of the “Mona Lisa” in the living room were folks who had just bought their first home and were thrilled to have walls of their own to decorate.

When you find a finished painting, Bird says, “you always find it in a frame, you always find it in a very nice frame, which attests to its place in the life of the owner.”

Perhaps the least likely object in the show is a meticulous version of “Swiss Village” by J. Edgar Hoover.

As Bird explains, the FBI chief was one of dozens of notables whose paint-by-number creations hung in the West Wing during the Eisenhower administration.

In hopes of generating art for the White House, the president’s appointment secretary, Thomas E. Stevens, solemnly presented paint-by-number kits to members of the Cabinet.

“The Cabinet is under the impression the president wants them to do them, an impression Stevens does little to dispel,” Bird explains with a chuckle.

Thus, a visitor to the exhibit will see both pop artist Andy Warhol’s ironic take on the craze and Hoover’s dutiful one. The juxtaposition, Bird promises, “is combustible.”