Art: 36th International

For two months every year the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, at other times a statue-stuffed monument to the late steel-master, becomes the world’s most comprehensive salon of oil painting. The Carnegie International Exhibition, assembled with shrewd relish by the Institute’s Director of Fine Arts Homer Saint-Gaudens, costs the estate of Andrew Carnegie about $40,000 a year, enlists the services of scouts in no less than ten European countries. Last month an international jury† spent two days picking eight prizewinners out of 365 paintings by U.S. and European artists; last fortnight all the paintings were expertly hung in the Institute’s 16 lofty galleries. For five days last week the galleries remained locked to all except a few silent critics. Then one rainy night Pittsburgh’s best people to the number of 4,000 crowded into the Institute, swished up the marble stairs and into the presence of contemporary Art.

Last year the Carnegie jury proved its professional taste by awarding first prize ($1,000) to French Artist Georges Braque for The Yellow Cloth, a cubist design of unusual beauty which Pittsburghers snooted for being “abstract” (TIME, Oct. 25). Last week’s opening night audience showed no such alarm over the 36th International first prize winner, The Wind (see cut), by German Karl Ilofer. Among critics it was a popular award. Long regarded as one of the most profound followers of Cézanne, 60-year-old Karl Hofer was a venerated teacher at the Berlin Academy until the Nazis ousted him. Grim, uneasy and intense as his great French master, he works hard by turns in Switzerland and in a sleazy Berlin studio. Last summer he told one of his friends he thought he was “at last beginning to do something.”

To most critics the jury’s choice not only recognized that Artist Hofer was right but pointed up the most dramatic national collection in the show. Augmented by eight Austrian painters this year, the German section got its drama from the fact that almost half the artists included are on the Nazi undesirable list. Some have begun to paint ostentatiously pretty pictures to atone for past sins, others are allowed, like Karl Hofer, to paint as they please but not to exhibit in Germany. Being a work of art, Hofer’s close-knit painting of two defenseless figures in an arbitrary swirl of blue drapery had more than one meaning, but it might certainly refer to the ill wind faced by German artists.

Excellence of The Wind lay not only in its severe economy of line, color and composition but in its classic clarity of mood. By comparison People (see cut), by U.S. Artist Arnold Blanch, winner of third prize ($500), seemed a stiff bit of social consciousness greatly damaged by the fumbling inclusion of Washington, D.C. In the U.S. section of 102 paintings, critics found as great or greater pleasure in Bernard Karfiol’s big, soft Summer; John Marin’s Sea with-Red Sky, a small canvas with a whipped cream lather of white paint which at 60 feet carried a spacious sense of foaming ocean.

The English section included a usual quota of anecdotal canvases and imitations of Vermeer, the usual distinctive paintings by Jack Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Eve Kirk, Duncan Grant and Augustus John. In the Spanish section Pablo Picasso, hitherto hung among the French, appeared for the first time with a razzle-dazzle in his late manner; Salvador Dali had a dream picture with a dream name, Anbattet, black, hellish red, and balefully beautiful. But for diversity and excitement in modern painting visitors once more had to hand it to the top-flight French. So did the jury. Second prize ($600) went to Winter, a stormy, snowy landscape by Maurice de Vlaminck; first, second, and fourth honorable mentions and the Allegheny County Garden Club prize went to Albert Marquet, Maurice Utrillo, Edmond Ceria and Roger Chapelain-Midy, Frenchmen all.

† Othon Friesz, Paris; Sydney Lee, London; John Carroll, Detroit; Charles Hopkinson, Boston.