Academic Art

Academicism was all over the place last week. In Manhattan opened the 114th annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design. Chicago's Art Institute, unofficial academy of the Middle West, had its 44th annual Artists-of-Chicago-&-Vicinity exhibition. In Manhattan's Durlacher Galleries opened the first representative U. S. showing of 17th-Century Nicolas Poussin, granddad of all French academic painters.

> Of 525 paintings, prints, drawings and pieces of sculpture in the Academy show, 331 were by nonmembers. All 525 had a staid, collective conformity. To Academicians, as usual, went the pick of the 16 prizes. Painter Abram Poole got a $750 Altman Prize for Young Dancer, a demure Victorian damsel in a flowing pink dress. To the new president, tweedy, grey-haired Hobart Nichols, went an award for Winter Pattern, one of his customary snow-covered landscapes. Said pleased President Nichols: "The Academy is like a pendulum to a clock--it assures a rational, regular, orderly progress. It has no room for experimentalists. . . . The Academy can afford to wait."

> Disgruntled exhibitors have long panned the Chicago local show because teachers at the Institute's art school sat on the jury, gave the prizes to their pupils. This year Institute Director Daniel Catton Rich sent out ballots to 1,091 eligible artists and asked them to elect their own jury. The results seemed about the same. "Dull mediocrity," said Critic Clarence Joseph Bulliet of the Chicago Daily News. Top prize, the Logan Medal and $500, went to Lawrence Adams for his bright, thinly painted West Side in Winter.

> Nicolas Poussin's balanced, harmonious paintings influenced David, Ingres, Corot, Cezanne, many another famed French artist.

Painter Poussin was born near Paris in 1594, worked there until in 1624 he scraped up enough money to go to Rome. He lived and painted in Rome till he died 41 years later. Well represented in the Durlacher show are his airy, romantic landscapes, his carefully voluptuous canvases of classic myths (Venus and Adonis, The Triumph of Bacchus), his poised, devout religious paintings.

Notable is the contrast between Poussin's vigorous first sketches and the restrained composition of his finished canvases. But the vigor of the first impression usually shone through the restraint.

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