700,000 Artists

ECA officials in Paris last week proudly displayed the winners in the biggest painting contest of the season. The competing artists: 700,000 European schoolchildren, aiming for $4,000 of ECA prize money. Theme: "The free peoples work together for a better life."

The youngsters, responding in numbers beyond the fondest hopes of ECA, worked out the theme in oils, watercolor and gouache. Some of the subjects: builders reconstructing homes and churches, porters unloading ships and trains, farmers planting their fields with U.S. grain. In successive judgings, the original entries were cut to 1,500, then to 300.

Winner of the first prize ($750) in the 12-to-16 age group was an Austrian boy named Franz Luttenberger, who did a happy gouache of his village. The other top prize went to a six-year-old French boy, Alain Cardot (4-to-11 class) for a spirited splash of workmen clambering over a half-built house. Alain was in seventh heaven. He lives in a cramped Paris tenement with his father, who is a pensioned French Resistance veteran, his mother and a sister. Said Alain: "Now, mama, I will buy you a bigger house."

ECA officials are planning to send the show on a tour of European capitals. Said one of them: "Frankly, we didn't expect anything this good."

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