Rock Candy

Art tastes do change. When Peter Blume's big, weird, neatly painted South of Scranton won the coveted Carnegie International prize 16 years ago, critics clucked and the public pooh-poohed. This year the Carnegie jury went overboard for a yet stranger painting by Paris Abstractionist Jacques Villon (TIME, Oct. 30). The Pittsburgh public, meanwhile, has caught up with Connecticut's Blume. When the ballots were counted, the popular prize went to his entry, The Rock.

The symbolism of Blume's picture--a huge, broken rock with scaffolding to the left of it and ruins to the right--is as obscure as his brushwork is precise. Blume, who at 44 looks rather like a dead-earnest Danny Kaye, believes "the rock symbol is bound to be enigmatic" (TIME, Jan. 17,1949). His painting's popularity, Blume confessed last week, had him "very baffled and certainly very pleased."

The Carnegie's retiring director, Homer Saint-Gaudens, recalls that the public "used to spit at 50 yards at a modern painting. Now they say, 'I don't know anything about it--it may be all right.' " Painter Blume had spent three long years candy-coating his enigmatic Rock with slick, Technicolored gloss, and the public seemed to like the taste.

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