Exhibitions: International in Pittsburgh

The Pittsburgh International Exhibition, held at the Carnegie Institute every three years, is one of the three best-known international art competitions in the world, together with the Venice and São Paulo biennials. It is also the most hard pressed. While the other two are under government sponsorship and invite nations to submit and finance their individual exhibits, the Pittsburgh exhibition, founded in 1896 by Andrew Carnegie, is backed almost entirely by a few private donors, principally the Mellon family.

Time was when the Carnegie International was handsomely equipped to scour the world and bring the finest in contemporary art to Pittsburgh. But the current budget of $160,000 does not go far in today’s rapidly expanding art world. The U.S.’s current exhibit at São Paulo alone cost $70,000 to mount. Despite his budgetary problems, Director Gustave von Groschwitz unveiled a formidable 44th Carnegie exhibition last week. An international jury found so many works of merit that it selected not one, but six artists as winners of $2,000 prizes (see color pages).

Tokenism & Assault. To assemble his show, Von Groschwitz spent six months traveling in Europe, Canada and the U.S.—though not Latin America, the Orient or the Iron Curtain countries. He returned from his foray with 221 paintings and 108 sculptures by 326 artists from 17 nations. Every idiom in the current vocabulary of art is represented: machines clang, lights flash and mobiles shift subtly. Von Groschwitz drew the line only at the European artist who submitted a piece of dynamic Dada that requires the viewer to light a fuse, then watch as the work blows up in his face.

Easily the most valuable and varied exhibits are those of the U.S. and Britain. Both galleries blaze with force and inventiveness, their billowing forms and brilliant hues seeming to leap off the walls and assault the viewer. By contrast, the gallery devoted to France seems cautious and dowdy—walls of neat and tidy paintings that sit back docilely and require pince-nez attention.

Galleries containing works by the artists of Spain, Japan and Italy are oddly disjointed and somehow déjà vu. Perhaps this is because, while Von Groschwitz visited many foreign countries, for economic reasons he has relied too often on sculptures already displayed in Manhattan galleries. Similarly, Brazil, Cuba, India, Mexico and the U.S.S.R. are represented by one artist apiece—a form of tokenism that might better have been bypassed.

About Time. When it came to the six $2,000 prizes, there was some rather dexterous international logrolling. In the end, the three-man jury, consisting of U.S. Sculptress Louise Nevelson, London’s Tate Gallery Director Norman Reid and the Venice Biennale’s Umbro Apollonio, seem to have awarded their prizes more on the basis of what the artists stood for than what they had submitted. The British were obviously entitled to at least two wins, and they got them for Eduardo Paolozzi’s convocation of pipe mains called Pisthetairos in Ipsi (a work named after an Aristophanes character played by Bert Lahr in Ypsilanti, Mich.) and Francis Bacon’s sinister triptych Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud (Sigmund’s grandson, and a painter). Italy, with the third largest representation (after France and the U.S.), won with Arnaldo Pomodoro’s gleaming totem titled The Traveler’s Column.

The Americans were probably entitled to more than one win, but it would not have been tactful to award the host country more, so the nod in somewhat symbolic fashion went to 79-year-old Josef Albers, whose luminous square-predate op art. For op art more à la mode, a prize was given to another father of op, France’s Victor Vasarely 59, for his vibrant Alom. As another gesture to la belle France, and presumably because he has been so influential with today’s neo-Dadaists, the jury awarded its sixth prize to a remarkably clumsy canvas by 74-year-old Joan Miró called Queen Marie-Louise of Prussia. “Why not?” asked Von Groschwitz, loyally defending the jury’s decision. “Miró hasn’t had a prize yet, and I say it’s about time.”