Academy's 112th

A fat melon is cut each year by the National Academy of Design. With its annual exhibition recently limited to just over 500 paintings, prints, drawings and pieces of sculpture, it has three medals and 15 prizes totaling $4,375 to distribute, not to speak of the dozen or so new memberships conferred on promising exhibitors who consider it a cachet to write A. N. A. after their names. Last week this melon was cut and on a crowded varnishing day the 112th exhibition of the National Academy of Design opened.

Little was there to surprise the critical. By its constitution the National Academy gives members the right to show one pic ture in the annual exhibition. Not all take advantage of this but there are 311 academicians. In addition, a certain number of artists are invited to submit works, which leaves precious little wall space for the thousands of uninvited canvases that the conservative hanging committee must annually examine, reject.

Elected to Associate Membership last week were 19 painters, sculptors and architects, among them: John Steuart Curry, Guy Pene du Bois, Reginald Marsh, Frank Mechau Jr., Mario Korbel, Joseph Renier, George Snowden, John Holabird, Dean Everett Meeks of the Yale School of Fine Arts. Many of the painters like Curry and Marsh were considered violent radi cals by Academicians eight or ten years ago, but kindly President Jonas Lie has in the three years of his incumbency been striving manfully to have the Academy follow, though belatedly, the times. Last week he explained that these elections were all provisional, would not be final until the neophytes had produced portraits (not necessarily self-portraits) of them selves for the Academy's collection.

As he has many times before, President Lie won one of the 15 prizes himself: $400 for a Maine landscape entitled Rock Bound Coast. Rockwell Kent won another prize for one of his familiar marine views, Reginald Marsh won a third for an equally familiar Bowery crowd before a sideshow.

New to Academy prizes, unfamiliar to Easterners was the winner of one of the two highest prizes in the show--the $700 Altman Prize for a figure painting by an American-born citizen, which went to Charles Stafford Duncan for Girl in Black, a study of a sombre, thin-faced young woman with a curiously rigid left hand, seated on a sofa.

Artist Duncan, who lives in San Francisco, is far from unknown to western advertisers. A director of the potent McCann-Erickson Advertising Agency, he is a strict office disciplinarian, a busy executive, and though he has finished no commercial drawings for 20 years, he still makes layouts and rough sketches for Del Monte Peaches and Standard Oil of California. For five years he served with Herbert Hoover on the San Francisco Art Commission, has exhibited frequently in West Coast shows.

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