Pop!

Manhattan's art season got under way with a loud pop this week. The annual Pepsi-Cola show had come to town.

This year's marriage of soft drink and oils was as rich and elegant as ever; the beaming groom gave the blushing bride $25,750 worth of prizes and "art fellowships." Served up in Manhattan's stuffy National Academy of Design, "Paintings of the Year" (267 of the 5,034 entries) was a better show than its two Pepsi-Cola predecessors, but it was nevertheless a massive layer cake of second-rate work. On top lay a thin icing of successful art.

It seemed as though the prize jury (a museum director, a critic, an artist) liked a little of everything. The prizewinners included Abraham Rattner's Picassoesque, blazing red and yellow Place of Darkness; Gregorio Prestopino's rock-solid study of a train stalled in a flood; Sydney Laufman's impressionistic Road in the Woods, which looked as though it had been daubed on with dirty cotton; Gladys Rockmore Davis' sugar-sweet ballet painting, Pink Tights. Somehow the jury agreed that an almost unknown Californian named Boris Deutsch deserved the $2,500 first prize--for his ragged, muddy-colored canvas of four weird, grief-crazed creatures with a dead child (see cut).

Lithuanian-born Artist Deutsch, 51, worked at his painting about seven months. "I interpreted the idea I had in me," he said, "and I did it with lines and colors. I can't do it with words." Yet Deutsch's title, What Atomic War Will Do to You, packed a timely wallop. Some thought it must have been the title that had the winning punch.

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