Fair Art

This month state-fair boards across the U.S. are handing out prize money to brush-and-chisel wielders as well as to cattle breeders and mincemeat experts. In most states painting and sculpture are displayed with the poultry, corn and hogs that sunburned fair visitors take in.

By last week, the judges had made up their minds which were the best paintings in many of the shows. Although a lot of the wall space went to Sunday and between-chore painters, the prizes with few exceptions were won by full-time artists whose work showed little signs of the soil, made few compromises with the traditional tastes of the average fairgoer.

Minnesota, which claimed the largest state-fair art show in the country, gave its first prize in oils to a poster-slick abstraction of a stage set that might have come out of a studio in midtown Manhattan. Iowa's prizewinner (in the '30s Grant Wood once won three firsts in a row) was a somber doorway that could have opened into a house on almost any Main Street in the land. California's winners, hung in a monster open-air cabana over beds of dazzling yellow marigolds, were low-keyed oil portraits with little sunshine in them. California cautiously separated the conservative sheep from the modern goats, awarded two sets of prizes. First prize (conservative) went to 31-year-old Chet Engle for his satirical self-portrait Tarquin. First prize (modern) went to 39-year-old Sueo Serisawa, for his portrait of his wife, Mary 1949. (Said Serisawa, who won honorable mention in last year's Pepsi-Cola competition with Mary 1948: "I use my wife as a model because she's always available around the house.")

At Columbus, Ohio's first prize for oils went to a savagely simplified study of St. Veronica by Stanley Twardowicz an instructor at Ohio State University.

In Illinois, where the Old Northwest Territory Art Exhibit competition drew off professional work and left the amateurs a show to themselves, Amateur Verne Alkire walked away with three prizes. But her conventional paintings of boats in a harbor, gladiolas, and a nursery, daubed between kitchen and barnyard duties, were no closer to the Illinois prairies than ex-Coastguardman Garo Antreasian's carefully composed painting of a sordid street in Indianapolis' South Side, which took grand prize at the Old Northwest.

Mrs. Alkire, like many a leather-faced farmer and ginghamed housewife who thought "they could do better," looked with a jaundiced eye at the shorthanded post-impressionist manners of the art-school artists. Sniffed she: "Art is done for beauty. Not that grotesque stuff. A picture is supposed to speak its own piece, the same as a billboard. If you have to stop and ask questions . . . it's no good."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.