Popular Win

In Washington's Corcoran Gallery last week the 15th Biennial Exhibition of U. S. painting closed. Out of more than 2,000 pictures submitted, the jury picked 461 pictures by 405 artists, from 28 States, distributed $5,000 in medals and prizes. Most of the best-known younger artists in the U. S. were represented. First prize ($2,000) went to Edward Hopper for one of his familiar old houses, painted in the sharp yellow light of a Cape Cod afternoon. Second prize ($1,500) and a silver medal went to Painter-Critic Guy Pene du Bois for a solidly painted young girl, stiffly upright in a chair. Pennsylvania Academy Instructor Francis Speight took the third prize for a farm woman collecting her mail. Critics found little of outstanding importance in the show, but uniformly praised the general excellence of the work. None objected to the judges' choices, found worthy of special mention other paintings by Bernard Keyes, Alexander Brook, Henry McFee, Raphael Soyer.

Near closing day last week, the Corcoran's last prize was awarded: the $200 popularity prize voted for by ordinary gallery-goers during the six weeks of the exhibition. Not one of the professional prizewinners or the critics' favorites was in the first half-dozen. To 343 humble Washingtonians, the best picture in the show had been Ballerina by Russian-born Feodor Zakharov, graduate of Imperial Moscow's Ecole des Beaux Arts, now a socialite U. S. portraitist. Slickly painted, showing a very refined young lady posed theatrically on tiptoe in the theatre wing, it won more than twice as many votes as its nearest competitor, Alice Through the Black Bottle, by Charles S. Chapman, another canvas missed by most professional critics. Impressed, the Toledo Art Museum invited Mr. Zakharov's Ballerina to its annual summer show of U. S. paintings.

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