Art: Out of the Ditch

Compared to the largesse that soda-pop barons, pearl merchants and encyclopedia publishers scatter for works of art, the prizes from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute are penny ante stuff. First prize at the Carnegie amounts to only $1,500, but it is still the most honorable award of the season.

The 1948 winner, announced last week, was a comparative newcomer in the little-money-big-honor circuit. One of 300 invited entrants, representing a cross-section of the best in U.S. art, Akron’s Raphael Gleitsmann, 38, had rung the bell with a rather obviously composed but very richly painted oil entitled Medieval Shadows (see cut). Its deep reds and browns, applied in thick gobs laid on with a knife and then overlaid with transparent glazes, had an ember-like glow.

Picked by a heavily conservative jury, the other prizewinners were equally somber, equally right of center: Andrew Wyeth’s near-photographic Christina Olsen took second, and Karl Zerbe’s cluttered but technically clever Actors took third. Wyeth’s almost monochromatic study showed that conservatism in art need not imply lack of imagination. Son of famed illustrator N. C. (Treasure Island) Wyeth, he had done justice to his drab subject in a way fresh enough to stop the eye, and hold the mind.

Prizewinner Gleitsmann fought as an infantryman in Patron’s Third Army, came back with a drooping mustache and, “for the first time in my life—something to say in paint.”

In a letter published in the current issue of American Artist, he tried to say it in words as well. “It has always seemed to me,” he began, “that the things man… builds are more of a picture of man than man himself.” Trudging inland from Omaha Beach, Gleitsmann got his first look at the bombed-out ruins of Europe, and that somehow completed the picture. He was hit in the hip at the Rhine, rolled into a ditch begging for his lost sketching kit: “In my semiconsciousness it became an obsession . . . The [wounded] men near me—partly out of sympathy and partly because they had a confused impression that something important was missing—began crawling up and down the ditch in a bewildered search…”

Back in the U.S., Gleitsmann continued the search on another plane: “I discovered that I would have to learn to paint all over again. The old technique was not flexible enough. I felt [I] could net succeed unless I developed a painting procedure that would call into play all the possibilities of color, texture, etc. that I was capable of producing.” Last week’s award showed that his search had taken him a piece along the road.