Art: Loveliest

Last week Arthur Leroy Bairnsfather of Birmingham, Ala. could not get over his surprise at what had happened down in Montgomery. A big, bushy-haired artist who once studied under Frank Duveneck (TIME, April 25), Mr. Bairnsfather never goes far afield for his subjects. Last summer he spent about 30 hours, smoked about 60 pipes, doing a brown and silver study of Dr. George Washington Carver, famed old Negro chemist at Tuskegee Institute. When the Southern States Art League, proud nurse of regional consciousness among artists from New Orleans to Charleston, held its 18th annual exhibition last month in Montgomery, Artist Bairnsfather sent in his portrait. What surprised him, as a Southerner, was that it got the Blanche S. Benjamin prize of $250 for “the loveliest painting of a Southern subject.” Jury’s reason: ”Spiritual rather than physical loveliness” inspired this breach with a tradition of landscape prize winners.