Art: Biggest Winner

In Paris’ National Museum of Modern Art last week the competition for the newest and biggest prize in art reached the finals. Nineteen national and international juries had selected 95 works from 19 countries to vie for the $10,000 grand prize, established this year by Manhattan’s multimillion-dollar Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, whose new $3,000,000, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum is now going up on Manhattan’s upper Fifth Avenue.

To narrow the overwhelmingly abstract field, the three-man jury, composed of the directors of the national museums of France and Belgium and Yugoslav Painter Marko Celebonovic, studied and argued for a heated five hours. Then the jury announced the winner: Ben Nicholson’s August 1956-Val d’Orcia (see cut).

For Perennial Prizewinner Nicholson (TIME, Nov. 19), who won the Carnegie International top award in 1952, was a prizewinner in the 1954 Venice Biennale, and earlier this year won the Grand Prize at the Lugano IV International, the cash was probably as welcome as the credit. Though “delighted by the award,” Winner Nicholson was not willing to go far toward helping viewers puzzle out the meaning of his serene grey, white and dull-brown forms. He would say only that Val d’Orcia is in Tuscany, adding abstractly: “Of course I should say that the color and shape, for color and shape are indivisible, are affected by the place.”