Art: State Fair

Is it for naught that where the tired crowds see

Only a place for trade, a teeming square,

Doors of high portent open unto me

Carved with great eagles and with hawthorns rare?

Vachel Lindsay was writing about his home town. For him, Springfield was more than the prosy, prosperous seat of Illinois’ State Fair; he saw it as a cultural capital of the future, where art would some day vie with corn, hogs and cattle for attention. The hopeful poet, who died in 1931, might well have been pleased by this year’s state fair. Last week, for the first time in Illinois history, fine art was among the exhibits.

On show were 134 oils, watercolors, sculptures and prints by artists of the “Old Northwest Territory” (Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin). Among the prizewinners: a windy, sunny street by veteran Chicago Impressionist Francis Chapin; a muscular tangle of nudes by Indiana’s Earnest Freed, entitled Battle of the Sexes. First prize ($1,000) went to Cleveland’s Dean Ellis, 27, for an encaustic cityscape which might well have been painted by Ellis’ former teacher, Karl Zerbe (TIME, Nov. 11).

The first day, about 5,000 people stomped in off the blaring midway for a look, munching hot dogs and sipping soda pop. The farmers and their families did a double-quick shuffle around the big brick Exposition Building’s art wing, and then moved on, with something like relief, to the more familiar exhibits. Said one dejected official: “These people come to see the latest harvesting machines, threshers and milking equipment, but what they want in art is what they saw in grandmother’s day.”

Just one painting held the crowd momentarily. Ivan Le Lorraine Albright’s pustulant portrait of Dorian Gray, painted for MGM’s movie of Oscar Wilde’s novel, stared arrestingly from under a strong spotlight. To keep calloused fingers off moldering Dorian, he was surrounded by a low grey fence. Blurted one housewife, after minutes of careful study: “Anyway, you can tell he’s English.” The man who painted the sorry sight had also contributed a lithographic Self Portrait (which won $50). It was better-dressed but no better-fleshed than Dorian. “That fellow,” confided one bemused farmer, “looks just like a dried up crab apple under my tree back home.” Said another: “The funniest thing I ever saw.”