Art: SINGING WALL

THE most adventurous big-money backer modern art has ever known was the late Solomon R. Guggenheim, multi millionaire mining magnate (Alaskan copper, Chilean nitrate, Bolivian tin) who late in life switched from collecting traditional Dutch masters to avant-garde art under the tutelage of his good friend and mentor, Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, set up Manhattan’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Two years ago his nephew, Harry F. Guggenheim, announced a biennial, round-the-world search for new paintings, established a purse of $10,000 for first prize.

For the second running of the sweepstakes this year, separate three-man juries in 22 countries (each with its own $1,000 national winner) were set up to ensure that only the best reached the finish line. Fortnight ago three top jurists (British Critic Sir Herbert Read, former Director General of French Museums Georges Salles and British Painter Morris Kestelman) were flown to Manhattan, repaired to a storage warehouse to inspect the final 114 oils and pick the grand-prize winner. “It was very quiet,” chuckled Georges Salles. “We sat in three chairs like the three judges of Hell.”

Judge Salles and his colleagues had good reason to chuckle. Reason: the winning work was not there at all, but 3,620 miles away on two 9-ft.-8-in.-high walls at Paris’ new UNESCO headquarters (see color). In a sense, the choice of Joan Miró, 65, involved some polite intramural logrolling. Both Englishman Read and Frenchman Salles are on the UNESCO art committee that commissioned the murals. “I was prepared to find something else that competed with Miró,” Sir Herbert Read said, “but I didn’t think for a moment the other works of art did. Surrealists are thought of as fantastic and frivolous. Without departing from the surrealist style, Miró had produced something on a monumental scale.” Georges Salles was ecstatic, declared: “Against the monotone of cement and travertine, Miró gives the song of color. It is not a painting against a wall; it is the wall itself that sings.”*

A longtime painter-around-Paris, Miró has lived in his native Spain since World War II, five years ago began new experiments in ceramics in collaboration with his old friend Josep Llorens-Artigas (TIME, Jan. 7, 1957). For the past two years he has been working hard on his UNESCO mural. Its imaginative images combine childlike delight with echoes of primitive Catalan signs and symbols. Once Miró destroyed one whole wall when it failed to please him, and began again. “Guessing the color of ceramic is like cooking a biscuit—you never know how it will come out,” explained one expert ruefully. Miró’s principal aim: “To make the murals harmonize with the architecture.”

Some have complained that the results are close to infantile scribblings. Retorts Miró: “If no one attacked my work, it would be a mediocre thing.”

* Honorable mentions: Japan’s Minoru Kawabata, 47; France’s Edouard Pignon, 53; Canada’s Jean-Paul Riopelle, 35; Portugal’s Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, 50.