Art: Mr. Carnegie’s Good Money

In the spring of 1930 a blond, square-shouldered young man sat in his Model-T Ford and looked at Scranton, Pa. He saw great black pyramids of coal, busy, puffing locomotives, dismal rows of workers’ houses. From Scranton he turned south to Bethlehem where there were steel mills and more locomotives.

Farther south he went, through the Shenandoah Valley where the sun sank scarlet behind the blue hills, through North Carolina with its little towns and their false-front buildings on Main Street. Finally the young man and his Ford reached Charleston, S. C. where the harbor water lay flat and blue. The thing he liked most in Charleston was the German cruiser Emden which one day steamed into port, made fast to a wharf. Mornings he watched brisk German sailors in white gymnasium suits doing setting-up exercises on the warship’s decks. Finally after a good long look, he started North toward Manhattan and his Connecticut home.

Peter Blume could not forget his automobile trip. As he thought about it, images mingled as in dreams. The coal turned red like the sun or blue like Charleston Harbor. The Emden sailors seemed to soar from the decks like birds. All the time Peter Blume was trying to paint what he had seen. He finally finished his picture with red and blue coal, flying sailors, the Emden conning tower, the houses at Scranton, the harbor at Charleston all painfully lumped together on one canvas.

Last week Peter Blume’s South of Scranton (see cut) won first prize ($1,500) in the Carnegie International Exhibition of Paintings at Pittsburgh, against 356 other canvases by 296 other artists from 13 countries. A surrealist picture, South of Scranton was characterized by flat, bright colors, razor-sharp outlines. Rare indeed was the critic who dared to stand up and cheer for it. The New York Sun’s Henry McBride, after a long description of his train trip to Pittsburgh during which a “sudden lurch” threw “an exceedingly handsome young woman” into his arms, finally got around to saying: “The prize-awarding this year has been peculiarly indiscreet . . . there is sure to be an outcry at the bestowal of first prize and $1,500 of Mr. Carnegie’s good money on such a work as Peter Blume’s South of Scranton.

This is a thin, tin-panny imitation of French ‘machine age’ art by a young American who tried hard to be in the latest fashion but didn’t succeed.”

Said the Pittsburgh Press’s Douglas Naylor of the No. 1 prizewinner: “Like some others, this reviewer smiled at first sight of South of Scranton. It seems reasonable to conclude that the cannon atop the queer turret is symbolic of capitalism.” William Germain Dooley of the Boston Evening Transcript: “All very childlike and charming and deliberately naïve—but also completely counterfeit and insincere. . . .”

Margaret Bruening of the New York Post: “A stunt canvas. … It has no apparent artistic value—its organization is nil, its color unpleasant.” Edward Alden Jewell of the New York Times: “An extraordinarily fine piece of . . . painting. The composition seems flawless; the color orchestration, subtle and convincing.” Second prize ($1,000) went to Germany’s Karl Hofer for an apathetic picture of three scantily clad males. U. S. Artist Sidney Laufman took the $500 third prize with a pleasant, unexciting Spring Landscape. The Allegheny Garden Club gave André Derain a $300 prize for a vase of roses.