Merry Christmas

"The long established world leader, French art, is now meeting face to face with its postwar challenger, the art of America." So said the catalogue foreword to an exhibition of 50 French and 50 American paintings that opened in a Manhattan gallery last week. Culled from some 10,000 entries, the pictures on display were all related in one way or another to Christmas; they had been painted for a $28,000 contest sponsored by the U.S. manufacturer of "Hallmark" cards (TIME, July 4), and many of them would show up on Christmas-card counters eventually.'

They made a surprisingly fine exhibition, and one that proved that subjective moderns need not be stultified by the task of painting theme pictures. The French, it appeared, were still champs: no U.S. entry could match the tonal subtlety of the winter landscapes by France's Christian Caillard and Roger Chapelain-Midy, or the sophistication of Oscar Dominguez' half-abstract Christmas tree, with its candles that cast pointed black shadows from each glowing wick, or the wit of Gustave Singier's bright blue abstraction, Noel Provencal, which looked as mindlessly gay and involved as a game of pick-up-sticks. What the U.S. entrants lacked in know-how they almost made up for in energy and imagination. Joseph Hirsch's Journey--an old man and a boy on a burro--looked as if it had been painted with mud from under the back stoop, and its only hint of Christmas was the sharp red of a couple of poinsettias in the boy's hand. But the red, contrasted with the dirty gloom of the rest of the picture, was enough; it made Journey one of the most moving canvases in the show. Edmund Lewandowski had chosen the Three Kings for a subject, and turned the Magi into a composite playing card. The result was not as handsome as real playing cards, but it had style and force.

The top prizes, $3,750 each, went to Fred Conway of St. Louis and France's Edouard Goerg, for pictures that most critics thought inferior. Goerg's Nativity with Birds was as stickily sweet as creme de menthe and appeared to have been sloshed on with a spoon. It did, however, look like something that people would buy in a Christmas card. Conway's Mother and Child lacked even that advantage; it was an all-but-indecipherable tangle of syrupy colors and tricky, scratch-and-patch textures without visible sentiment of any kind. Conway, who golfs about as well (in the high 70s) as he paints, had clearly taken great pains to scramble his prizewinner. Painting, he says, is like golfing: "Hitting the ball for miles and miles to try to get it into that little hole."

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