Art: Proletarian Gloom

“A more depressing and discouraging exhibit than the 46th annual American Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture which opens today in the Art Institute has rarely been staged in Chicago. … If this is American art, let us scrap it and start over.”—Eleanor Jewett in the Chicago Tribune.

“A desperate sense of humor, clutching at whatever pleasing it could find in the sullen array of ‘social protest’ and of drab ‘American scene,’ seems to have actuated the prize-awarding jurors. . . . The present show is largely invited and presumably is a carefully considered cross-section of American art as it is being produced in the studios of today. If so, then the proletarian gloom that hangs over our artists is becoming as thick as Stalin’s Russian fog.”—Clarence Joseph Bulliet in the Chicago Daily News.

Undeterred by these bitter blasts from Chicago’s two best-known critics, some 4,500 people rushed to the Art Institute on opening day last week, consumed gallons of tea dispensed by Mrs. Potter Palmer and a group of subsidiary socialites, looked at the pictures.

Two-hundred-and-eighty-four canvases and pieces of sculpture were on view. In general critics from Manhattan were inclined to agree with their Chicago confreres. Jurymen Lloyd Goodrich, Waldo Peirce and Henry Varnum Poor awarded the $500 Frank G. Logan prize to pretty Doris Lee of Woodstock. N. Y. for an animated cartoon of U. S. farm life entitled Thanksgiving. In an old-fashioned kitchen with modern linoleum on the floor, a pair of twins are squalling for their dinner in a highchair, a cook is basting the turkey, a scrawny aunt hurries in with a basket of vegetables, a naughty child tosses scraps of ham fat to a kitten.

Best of the other prizewinners was

Sandy Valley by Clyde Singer, a landscape in the manner of John Steuart Curry in which an incredibly red sun was setting behind an equally red farmhouse while a railway train let out a plume of smoke in the middle distance. It won the $500 Norman Wait Harris Medal. Gallery visitors greeted with relief that ably-painted veteran of a dozen U. S. art shows, Eugene Speicher’s portrait of a mustached blacksmith, Red Moore (TIME, April 1).