Waugh Water

This week for the fourth successive year the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh announced that the most popular painting at the Carnegie International Exhibition was a seascape by 76-year-old Frederick Judd Waugh (TIME, Dec. 17, 1934, et seq.). Mr. Waugh's Meridian got 800 votes out of a total of 5,000 cast by visitors who had no less than 407 paintings to choose from.

Snooty critics are accustomed to laugh out loud at the work of aged Artist Waugh: 1) because it is limited almost entirely to realistic paintings of surf, and 2) because his surf pictures are "all alike." Although Artist Waugh paints the sea as it looks from not greatly dissimilar rocks near his Cape Cod home, sympathetic critics find his paintings no more nor less alike than the inexhaustible aspects of ocean water. In eschewing all human subjects for the sea, F. J. Waugh is actually akin to abstractionists like Georges Braque, winner of the Carnegie first prize this year (TIME, Oct. 25). Many Waugh admirers would be surprised to know that he occasionally paints, but does not exhibit serious abstractions.

"The sea, to my way of thinking, should look like the sea," says Artist Waugh. "Personally, my own liking is for purely decorative design, running into the abstract. I claim painting has qualities like music, if one goes after them--a thing in itself, not in existence before it is painted into existence."

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