Art: What Wins a Prize?

What Wins a Prize? “It is as much a mistake to accept a thing without understanding it as to reject it without understanding it,” Sculptor Jo Davidson wrote at the time when Manhattan’s famed 1913 Armory Show plunged the U.S. headlong into modern art. Davidson’s counsel was still being pondered this week as museum doors opened on the two biggest prize-giving events of the year. Washington’s 25th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago’s 62nd American Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, which together announced awards totaling $12.200. Between them, the two shows constituted a study of contemporary U.S. painting and sculpture, and supplied this year’s answers to the perennial question in art: “What does it take to win a prize?”

In Chicago the modern-minded jury considered 171 candidates, whose styles ranged from meticulous realism to slapdash expressionism, then placed its stamp of approval firmly on New York’s avantgarde. The winners, chosen by Museum of Modern Art Collections Curator Dorothy C. Miller. Chicago-born Painter Arthur Osver and Manhattan Sculptor-Welder Theodore Roszak:

¶First prize ($2,000) to Bronx Sculptor-Welder Seymour Lipton, 53. for his bronze-braised, 8-ft. tall The Cloak (left). Lipton, who finally retired from dentistry two years ago to become a full-time sculptor and now has work in eleven museums, takes his cue from biological forms, feels that The Cloak, with its enclosing forms, symbolizes the fact that for man, as well as plant life, “protection is necessary if there is to be growth.” ¶Second prize ($1,000) to Abstract Expressionist James Brooks, 50, for his swirling 7-ft.-by-7-ft. R-1953 (right), a noncommittal title indicating alphabetically that it was Brooks’s 18th painting in 1953. Born in St. Louis, Artist Brooks is a former WPA muralist (La Guardia Airport’s 235-ft. Marine Terminal mural) who switched’over to abstraction, after Army service in World War II, “with a sense of reawakening and release.” For Brooks, “the meaning is in the series of relationships, the pressures, the visual shifts. I don’t feel the need of everyday objects in my work, though I wouldn’t resent them if they appeared.”

¶Third prize ($750) to Rumanian-born Hedda Sterne, 41, for her luminous, evocative New York, shown in last summer’s Venice Biennale. Wife of Cartoonist Saul Steinberg, Hedda Sterne takes as her starting point the grid of city streets, blends them with Manhattan’s neon lights, ends up with an abstraction she calls “synthetic: nothing is absent and yet it is not a reproduction.”

In Washington the more conservative Corcoran jury, made up of Corcoran Director Hermann Warner Williams Jr., Metropolitan Museum Curator of Paintings Theodore Rousseau Jr. and Philadelphia Museum Painting Curator Henry Clifford, took three days to weed through 1,643 submitted paintings. Then they underlined by their choices the two trends they felt most evident in the heavily abstract field: i) a move toward more recognizable subject matter, and 2) a surprising strength in oldtime geometric abstractions. Loren Maclver’s softly luminous The Street (see next spread), which carried off first honors, was called by one juror “very, very sensitive and charming, with more feeling than almost any other picture there.” Fritz Glarner’s Relational Painting Number 79, second-prize choice, demonstrated that a Mondrian disciple can stress the master’s geometry out of plumb and still retain its purity. An even more austere geometric form, Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square—”Yes” won third prize. Robert Gwathmey’s The Clearing, a study in posterlike realism, looked downright old-fashioned by comparison.

Sobering afterthoughts were two other exhibitions staged by the Corcoran. In one salon were hung 24 past winners, ranging from little-known Willard L. Metcalf’s moonlit May Night to John Hult-berg’s Yellow Sky (TIME, May 2, 1955), and including Childe Hassam, George Bellows and Edward Hopper. Across the hall was a first-rate collection made up of nothing but onetime nonwinners: Albert Pinkham Ryder, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Sloan, Marsden Hartley and John Marin. Said Corcoran Director Williams: “We know from the statistics of previous shows that only three or four of the exhibitors will be names to conjure with in the year 2007. Which ones are they?”