Art: Carnegie Show

Some three miles from downtown Pittsburgh, on the Monongahela side of the city which is darkened on days of east wind by smoke from the steel mills in the valley, the pseudo-Renaissance building of the Carnegie Institute stands, blackened by 40 years. There last week critics of art, newspapermen and Pittsburgh’s gentlest people assembled one evening to attend a brief ceremony in memory of Andrew Carnegie, then to crowd murmuring up the Institute’s broad marble stairs into 17 galleries hung with 407 paintings by artists of 13 nations. The occasion was the opening of the 35th annual Carnegie International Exhibition, biggest competitive show of contemporary paintings in the world; If Leonardo da Vinci were given one evening of life each year to study the painting of his successors, chances are that the great Florentine experimenter, well acquainted by now with “abstractions,” would have shrugged, smiled, agreed last week with the Carnegie jury which unanimously awarded first prize ($1,000) to Georges Braque of Paris for a design called The Yellow Cloth (see cut).

Masterpieces at the Carnegie show in abstract or other methods of painting were conspicuously rare. Second prize ($600) was awarded for Woman Near a Table, a semi-nude against a clever perspective, done in sombre blues and browns by Italian Felice Casorati. Neither this nor the third prize ($500) winner, Family Portrait by young Josef Pieper of Düsseldorf, Germany, was distinguished by that finality of excellence which makes good critics stand long and stare. Nazi Pieper’s painting, which this year won the State Prize for painting at the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts, seemed to many critics more successful in the first part of the artist’s purpose: “To subdue every element—drawing, form and substance—” than in the second: “To achieve a reality from within rather than from without.”

As a recognition that painting of a certain discreet integrity is still permitted in the Reich, the third-prize award had its informative virtues. Devotees of surrealism would have preferred two unquestionably brilliant, fantastic paintings by Spanish Salvador Dali: Métamorphose de Narcisse and Soft Construction With Boiled Beans, 1936, whose agonized self-torn figure, partly carcass, called by the artist a “Premonition of Civil War,” was one of the amazingly few paintings which reflected current world passions. To U. S. art enthusiasts several challengers appeared in the lively array of paintings by 107 U. S. artists: Edward Hopper’s Corcoran Gold Medal Winner, Cape Cod Afternoon, Charles Sheeler’s immaculately conceived City Interior, Frank Mechau’s Last of the Wild Horses. Only U. S. painter in the money, however, was Manhattan’s Robert Philipp, who won first honorable mention ($400) with Dust to Dust, a dustless scene of mourners standing at an open grave in a cold March rain.

In the prosperous years before Depression the Carnegie Institute spent up to $60,000 on the Carnegie International. This year it spent about $35,000. The Institute’s Director Homer Schiff Saint-Gaudens was especially proud last week of the work done in Spain by the Institute’s nervy emissary, Margaret Palmer, who got many of her contemporary paintings out of Madrid in an army truck provided by the Loyalist Government to take a load of Goyas to Valencia. All 407 paintings were in place by the last week in September, when the four judges, each armed with 15 Dennison stickers the first day and seven the second, strolled through the galleries, licking, sticking, narrowing down the field for the final choices.

Immortal Pattern? To others than a hypothetical da Vinci, The Yellow Cloth last week looked like a masterly success in the highly specialized field which Georges Braque took for his province 30 years ago and has never deserted. A big canvas, almost 5-by-4 ft., it hangs on the same wall with a Picasso Harlequin, a stormy Vlaminck meadow, a Matisse nude and a figure painting by Segonzac. All of these painters except Vlaminck are onetime winners of the Carnegie first prize. The Braque painting rather gained than lost by their company. Why this was true few critics and fewer spectators could say in confident, simple words. But confident and extremely simple were the words of derision with which, as in other years when the Carnegie jury has plumped for the avantgarde, many a puzzled layman responded to an award made by four experts on painting.*

Familiar with such devices of abstraction from reality as rapid changes of time, place and angle in the cinema, plain citizens are still unreconciled with corresponding devices in painting like Cubism, which Braque above all living painters most clearly represents. The purpose of The Yellow Cloth is simply to show different, fresher and more beautiful appearances than an ordinary collection of objects on a table would possess. Braque’s table is not necessarily out of perspective, since it would be possible to construct a table which would have exactly the same form. In a dining room such a table would not be useful; in a decorative painting its form may be. For the same reason Braque’s colors, from the vivid yellow triangle of the tablecloth through the reddish brown of the wickerwork basket, the darker red of the shadow form at the right of the table, the grey-blues and green-blues of the structural background, are an improvement on the colors light would make in an ordinary room. To painters, Braque’s stucco-textured colors themselves seemed brilliant inventions.

Georges Braque is now a big, rugged man with white hair and deep-set eyes. He was born in 1882 at Argenteuil near Paris, received a good technical training at several private art academies. About 1907 Braque and Picasso began to do geometric abstractions from nature and ‘Picasso enjoyed calling Braque his “cher maitre.” Later Picasso remarked that Braque and James Joyce were the “incomprehensibles whom anyone could understand.” In the War Braque served as a lieutenant of infantry, was severely wounded, won the Croix de Guerre. Since the War, while his good friend Picasso has leaped from style to style with unparalleled agility, Georges Braque has gone on trying steadfastly, time after time, to derive from impermanent objects an immortal pattern.

* Henry Varnum Poor, Judson Smith, Raoul Dufy, Ferruccro Ferrazzi.