Art: Soda Jerk America

The year’s top money event for U.S. artists ($15,250 in prizes) was uncorked in Manhattan this week by the art-conscious Pepsi-Cola Co. It proved to be more rewarding to the artists than to the onlookers.

Called a “Portrait of America,” its 20 prizewinners painted languid river and country scenes, flower vases, Negroes at play. Only one of them even hinted that the U.S. had been at war.

Probably the most interesting of the lot was Morning Conference (see cut), which won 38-year-old Gregorio Prestopino a $1,500 third prize. Its three construction workers, talking things over on a snowy day, had faces that might have intrigued a Pieter Breughel—or a William Steig.

Other prizes ranged from typical Max Weber still life, Colonial Table (second prize) to one of Ivan LeLorraine Albright’s painfully detailed studies of decay. Where-Fore Now Ariseth the Illusion of a Third Dimension, an also-ran. Sure eye-catchers were two robust paintings of fishermen —Jon Corbino’s moody, swirling Fog, which caught a moment of mist-bound helplessness at sea, and Zolton Sepeshy’s briny fifth prize, Fisherman’s Morning, full of the smells of a Lake Michigan fish pier.

The surprising $2,500 first prize winner* was a cluttered, satirical Soda Jerker by 5 9-year-old Manhattan-born modernist Paul Burlin. Pepsi-Cola, which reproduces prizewinners on a calendar, carefully omitted Soda Jerker. Burlin painted it nine years ago, before he ever heard of Pepsi-Cola, to show the drugstore “as an ironic, decorative melange. It’s a hell of a place to eat.”

*The No.1 U.S. art show, the Carnegie Exhibition, pays its first prizewinner $1,000.