Art: International Exhibition

This year again a committee of artists announced the award of three prizes at the opening of the International Exhibition of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The committee were all judges of repute: spectacled Eugene Speicher of . the U. S. (an intimate friend of the late George Bellows), sharp-faced Felice Casorati of Italy, calm Abram Poole of the U. S., Horatio Walker of the U. S., jaunty Maurice Denis of France, white-tufted Maurice Greiffenhagen of England, bald Karl Hofer of Germany, Homer Schiff Saint-Gaudens* of the U. S. (Director, of. Fine Arts at the Carnegie Institute), and Eugene Savage of the U.S.

The first prize ($1,500) they awarded to a still life by Henri Matisse. Perhaps it was unfortunate that the highest honors should fall to a Frenchman whose name is a legend in modern painting; but the picture, in which great brilliant fruits and flowers coiled themselves into a pattern like the graph of a sunset, made the award imperative.

Motherhood, winner of $1,000, Belgian Anto Carte’s study of a peasant girl sitting on a bench and holding her baby, would have been no more than a suave reiteration had its composition been less finely handled, its line less precisely firm.

Third prize ($500) was given to Andrew Dasburg of Santa Fe. He had painted a ‘ table, on which a vase was full of poppy petals, heaped on the canvas like the bright blood of an immortal.

The 1927 exhibition was less heterogeneous than previous ones; there was not one picture of the 400 hung that did not merit a place in the show. This was because Director Homer Saint-Gaudens, when he went abroad last spring to invite certain artists to show their work, did not, as has previously been mandatory, limit each exhibitor to one picture. By including fewer artists, he allowed each one to send several representations. Lay visitors—including Calvin Coolidge, Andrew W. Mellon, Paul Claudel—were dazzled as they looked at the blobs of irregular fire against the walls of the Institute; never before has the International hung so many modernists or rated them so in the prize awards.

*Son of the late famed sculptor, Augustus-Saint Gaudens.