Carnegie Show

Emissaries of the U. S. art world last week went out Forbes Street in Pittsburgh, past the ball park to the rambling old Carnegie Library to see the 31st Carnegie Institute International Exhibition of Modern Paintings. It was a smaller show than those of the Institute's lively past, but there were still plenty of pictures to see. Eleven nations offered 351 paintings; 274 artists were represented, 125 of them from the U. S.

For the second time in the Institute's history no artists were on the jury of award. Four museum directors--Homer Schiff Saint-Gaudens of Pittsburgh, Robert Bartholow Harshe of Chicago, Cuthbert Powell Minnigerode of Washington, Meyric R. Rogers of St. Louis--distributed $3,300 in prizes, as usual had their decisions loudly challenged by art critics.

Greatest surprise was the award of the $1,500 first prize to France's Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac for a sketchy landscape of St. Tropez. Painter de Segonzac, 49, is an important artist, has won the gratitude of Riviera realtors by first discovering the possibilities of the Gulf of St. Tropez in 1906. But few critics could find anything in this particular canvas to lift it above any one of 30 or 40 others in the show.

Much more popular awards were the second and third prizes to U. S. Artists John Steuart Curry and Henry Varnum Poor. Chunky, corn-fed John Steuart Curry is Kansas' gift to the arts (TIME, April 10). Growing yearly in reputation and ability, Painter Curry's solid, exciting canvases of life on the prairies have been widely shown, generously bought by all but Kansans. "Tornado," the canvas that won him $1,000 last week, shows a Kansas family diving for a storm cellar as a dusty horn of wind sweeps in from the darkened horizon. On its first showing in an exhibition arranged by jovial William Allen White, onetime Governor Henry J. Allen's wife deplored: "Cyclones . . . are certainly to be found in Kansas, but why must Mr. Curry paint these freakish subjects? His self-portrait shows . . . a boyhood that has only seen the most sordid conditions of life."

Far from his best work is Henry Varnum Poor's canvas, "March Sun" showing two girls and a towheaded child drowsing round a table in the bright light of a window, yet in its drawing and color it shows how far Artist Poor has advanced since the time several years ago when he gave up painting, as he thought for good, to retire to the country, build his own home, and mold, fire and glaze tiles, vases and urns that won him the reputation of the country's greatest potter. Richer Poor canvases were on view in a one-man show in Manhattan's Rehn Galleries last week where landscapes, still lifes, and in particular a figure study entitled "The Pink Tablecloth" won high hosannas.

The entire French section seemed to most observers disappointing, badly chosen. Most impressive of the foreign delegations was that of Spain, possibly because modern Spanish painting is still a surprise to most U. S. critics.

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