Philadelphia Honors

The annual exhibit of U.S. painting and sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (founded 1805) is the oldest art show in the U.S. Nowadays, the academy also tries to make it one of the nation's most conscientiously representative. Philadelphia's method is to invite most of the country's established painters and sculptors to exhibit, then let juries sift the work of newcomers and the uninvited. Last week, after looking over 2,331 pieces of U.S. art and weeding them down to 442, the academy called in the public.

Conservatives found more things to their liking than in recent shows, thanks to some of the invitations extended by the chairman of this year's painting jury, popular Leon Kroll. The moderns predominated in both painting and sculpture, but in awarding the top prizes the judges ignored the more hectic advance guard.

The Temple Medal (no cash) for the best oil, awarded in the past to such masters as Whistler, Winslow Homer and George Bellows, went to Louis Guglielmi of Manhattan for his New York 21, an expert semi-abstraction. Lithuanian-born Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz admitted that he was bucked up when his Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, a powerful, aggressively ugly study in plaster, won the top sculpture award. A few days after he sent Prometheus off to Philadelphia for the academy show, fire destroyed his Manhattan studio, along with ten years of work in models, sketches and drawings. "Part of my life is gone," said Lipchitz, "but the fact that Prometheus is safe and honored has given me the faith to begin again at 60."

The central painting on the so-called "Honor Wall" of the main gallery was by Jury Chairman Kroll himself. Called August Morning, it was a flawlessly drawn nude drying her hair at the edge of a garden pool. It seemed to be holding the public's eye as successfully as anything in the show.

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