Americans Only

In the piping times of peace, the Carnegie International show, held annually in the dingy, tomblike Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, is the world's biggest competitive panorama of contemporary painting.

World War I made Carnegie drop the show for six years; Depression (1932) for one.

Last week Carnegie passed up what was to have been its 38th International, put on instead a bang-up $3,000,000 survey of U. S. painting--367 pictures, dating from 1680 to 1940. The show opened, according to tradition, with Founder's Day ceremonies at the Institute.

Strictly by invitation, Pittsburgh's stiffest and shiniest shirts ranked themselves on the Carnegie stage, decked and double-decked with greenery-yallery ferns and flowers. The ceremonies went on the air with the national anthem, thanksgivings for the late Mr. Carnegie, and warblings by a home-grown soprano, who sang The Last Rose of Summer as an encore.

For the show itself, great tribute was paid to the Carnegie Director of Fine Arts Homer Saint-Gaudens, distinguished-looking under his shock of grey hair and the burden of his sculptor father's great name. Assistant Director John O'Connor Jr. was the man who did most of the work. Despite the fact that it was primitively lighted and awkwardly arranged, the show was a top-notch survey of U. S. art, eclipsing even the fine one put on two summers ago by the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan.

Living artists (whose work comprised one-third of that shown) were mostly allowed to send in what they liked. Since most of the contemporary pictures were for sale ($400 to $12,000), many an artist submitted canvases--like Eugene Speicher's "Red" Moore, Blacksmith--which had kicked around unsold. But there were good new pictures, notably Reginald Marsh's swirling skating scene, Prometheus in Rockefeller Center.

Well represented in the show were early U. S. portraitists, 19th-Century genre painters, the top-notch trio of Homer, Ryder and Eakins. There were plenty of surprising items: a huge, romantic, melodramatic scene by Copley, Watson and the Shark; a nude, Ariadne Asleep in the Island of Naxos, painted in a day when nudes were taboo, by Gilbert Stuart's pupil Vanderlyn; a pioneer surrealist work, Deluge, by Washington Allston, with limp white corpses, fantastic serpents, a four-fanged she-wolf; Raphael Peale's After the Bath, in which the ultra-realistic painting of pins in a towel antedated the work of meticulous Realist William Harnett.

The Carnegie contemporary section was well hung by slight, white-pated ex-Jockey Jack Nash, who always hangs the International show, invariably guesses the first-prize winner before the jury picks it. He knows how artist jurors' minds work. This year there are no Carnegie prizes, but the Institute set aside $5,000 to buy pictures from the show. Last week Jack Nash was stumped, made no predictions. The purchases will be made by the Fine Arts Committee, composed of laymen, and laymen's choices are beyond Jack Nash.

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