The Big Show

The U.S. art event of the year took place last week: Pittsburgh's 50th annual Carnegie awards. But just as last year the show did not compare with the old Carnegie Internationals, which displayed such greats as Braque, Matisse, Picasso, and Britain's Augustus John. It was strictly an all-American show by 300 invited artists.

Carnegie 1946 was filled with plenty of the pleasant landscapes and appreciative portraits which generally win the $200 popular prize awarded at the end of the show. But Carnegie's three conservative jurors picked a far from conservative trio of official prizewinners. First prize ($1,000) went to hulking Karl Knaths for his gray-green, deftly tangled Gear, a composite of the Provincetown, Mass, waterfront (see cut).

Second and third prize went to a couple of propagandists in paint: second to Boston's perpetually angry young Jack Levine for his bitter Welcome Home (TIME, May 20), a mottled-looking general at a misty banquet; third to William Cropper's muddy, violent Don Quixote No. i, a starved white horse and black-armored rider careening past theatrical rocks.

Prizewinner Knaths, 54, was apprenticed to a baker at 19. He used discarded box linings for drawing paper, contrived hundreds of escapes from the steaming bakery into a world of his own making. As an art student, Knaths learned a new escape trick: Pablo Picasso and Swiss fantasist Paul Klee taught him how to tear down what he saw and rebuild it to suit himself.

Knaths and his wife live in a shingled cottage near Provincetown's breakwater.

Until recently, when his art began to pay off, Knaths got along by part-time art teaching and carpentry. Said he, mildly, when he heard the news of his $1,000 Carnegie prize: "The furnace has burst, and I suppose we'll use the money to get it fixed."

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