Pennsylvania Academy

If there is a norm in U. S. painting, it may best be studied at exhibitions of Manhattan's National Academy and Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy. These perennial shows are more famed for politeness than for pungency, for plethora than for power. There are always innumerable nice landscapes, portraits, still-lifes. Very few of them are incandescent with genius. Interest is in trends and tendencies rather than transcendent individuals. The last National Academy show was ponderously conventional (TIME, Dec. 17). At the 124th annual Pennsylvania Academy exhibition, opened last week, the advanced group was more numerous than in Manhattan, but the squatting conservatives still dominated the wall space.

Prizes, however, were awarded to work in fresh, distinctive modes. Robert Henri, bright, sketchy painter of children whose eyes would pop at dolls and toy engines, whose lips would pucker wetly at lollypops, won the Temple Gold Medal for painting with his fluffy, serious Wee Woman. A lean, angular and sour ancient in a dark figured dress, called Madame du Tarte, won for Richard Lahey the Carol Beck Medal for portraiture. Bruce Moore's Black Panther, in savage, undulating stride, won the George D. Widener Memorial Gold Medal for sculpture.