Art: Artists’ Choice

Next to the Carnegie show (TIME, Oct. 22), the “Chicago Annual” is the season’s biggest U.S. art event. This year 162 U.S. artists were invited to exhibit, and were tempted with $4,000 in cash prizes—$800 more than Carnegie offers. The jury, imported from New York, included Juliana Force, doughty duenna of Manhattan’s Whitney Museum of American Art, and two divergent painters of Manhattan life: Reginald Marsh, who paints it like a carnival barker, and Raphael Soyer, who paints it like a soft-hearted social worker. As happens with artist-dominated juries, the prizes at Chicago’s Art Institute went to technically excellent paintings. Artists, who know about means, apparently care less about each others’ ends.

They gave $750 top honors to wiry, bigbeaked oldtimer (69) Kenneth Hayes Miller for a milk-&-honey, saloon-style nude entitled Reverie (see cut). Miller’s explanation for his choice of subject: “I have an appetite for form.” Miller sates his appetite with a practiced brush, has taught many topflight U.S. artists to do likewise. Three other prizewinners in the show, Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Edward Laning, once studied under him. So did Juryman Reginald Marsh.

Hopper won the $500 Logan Prize with Hotel Lobby (see cut), in which the pattern of electric light on the tired transients and commonplace interior creates an illusion of a moment stopped in time, turning the genteel lobby into a monument of weariness and melancholy. Born 63 years ago, tall (6 ft. 4 5/8 in.), quiet Edward Hopper started slowly, hit his stride after 40. His plain pictorial statements of what he sees are so authoritatively final that some critics regard him as a U.S. master.