Made in U. S. A.

At Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute last week, the year's handsomest cross section of current U.S. painting went on display. It was the last of the institute's national surveys; next year the Carnegie will go back to its international annuals which were interrupted by the war. Smaller and more selective than Paris' "Salon d'Automne" (TIME, Oct. 17), the Carnegie exhibition proved that U.S. artists can hold their own with the French.

The 300 pictures in the show included something by almost every first-rank U.S. painter. Edward Hopper had sent along a harshly lit Conference at Night that was rock-solid in composition and rock-bare in theme. It made a notable addition to Hopper's hard comments on the loneliness and scantiness of a lot of city life--paintings that bite deeper than propaganda pictures of the "social-consciousness" school ever could. By contrast, Grandma Moses' glowing, not very "primitive" Out for the Christmas Trees and Louis Bouche's slapdash evocation of the New Lebanon Railroad Station, though just as true to American life, were as warm and easy to take as a sunshiny day.

Really There. There were a few fine portraits. Lester Bentley's George Wyckoff Jr., a straightforward picture of a boy whittling, looked like a good bet to win the exhibition's popularity prize. Charles Hopkinson's carefully constructed Double Portrait of a mother and daughter showed the dean of U.S. portraitists at the top of his form. At 80, Hopkinson is more than ever concerned with creating an illusion M>f reality on canvas. "Things are really there," he explains, with a diffident wave of his hand, "so why shouldn't one try to capture the thereness of them?"

The surrealists appeared to be on the decline. Max Ernst's bilious yellow Feast of the Gods looked somewhat as if Ernst thought the gods dined on toadstools and mustard. The cleverest thing about Salvador Dali's photographically sharp picture of a cloth egg under a parasol was its title: Geopoliticus.

The top prizes, awarded by a conservative, three-man jury, went to expressionists, i.e., people who paint what they feel instead of what they see. Philip Evergood, 47, took second prize with a vaguely political parody of a mythological theme: Leda in High Places. Leda and the swan (which Evergood intended to represent "nature" and "man's ideals") were elegantly drawn and painted to shine like new snow, but the picture fell apart at the top and degenerated into cartooning at the bottom. Leda's just-hatched twins were cast as symbols of race-hatred. The prize they fought for, a cracked Easter egg in the background, was filled with gold coins.

Curiously Unreal. The $1,500 first prize went to German-born Max Beckmann, 65, whom Hitler denounced and hounded out of Germany as a "degenerate" painter. Beckmann's big Fisherwomen was far from being the jut-jawed old master's best or most ambitious work, but ft did show his genius for color as well as his penchant for whipping cruelty and tenderness together into sexy, curiously unreal oils. His lamplit fisherwomen did not look like the sort that go near the water. Their hot peach flesh was set off by black garters and contrasted with the cold rose, blue and gold of the gasping fish. In the background of the composition, a dour old crone hugged a rigid eel.

Beckmann, who took out his U.S. citizenship papers last year, teaches at the Brooklyn Museum Art School two mornings a week, turns up at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel almost every afternoon at 5:00 for a cup of solitary coffee amidst the potted palms. "It is there," he says, "that I make my fantasies for my work." He often puts fish in his pictures "because I like fish, both to eat and to look at. Also they are symbols." What do they symbolize? "Geist--spirit," Beckmann replies positively. "But the man who looks at my pictures must figure them out for himself."

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