3oth Carnegie

30th Carnegie

It is possible to have a profound knowledge of literature and never leave your bedroom. To speak authoritatively about, painting you must travel. To appreciate El Greco alone a critic must have visited galleries in London, Dresden, Madrid, Toledo, New York. This week Pittsburgh, Pa. repeated its annual claim to a place on the art critic's itinerary. The 30th annual International Exhibition of the Carnegie Institute opened. On hand were 496 pictures by 281 artists from 16 countries. Judges were assembled. Prizes were awarded. It was a big affair.

A quick walk through the 21 galleries of the exhibition showed reporters two things.

From timid beginnings the Carnegie show has now evolved into what is probably the most important showing of modernist pictures in the U. S. The Carnegie International no longer considers itself an agency for the discovery of unknown talent. Director Homer Saint-Gaudens and his associates have decided that there are plenty of other organizations dedicated to that purpose, that their job is to show the citizens of Pittsburgh the work of the best artists that they can assemble. This year in an exhibition of nearly 500 pictures only 30 places were left open for unsolicited works.

Hundreds of U. S. painters strove for the 30 open places. For days the U. S. committee of selection--Artists Randall Davey, Jonas Lie, Eugene Speicher. Ernest Blumenschein, Charles Rosen--sat in a bleak gallery while porters propped up more than 1,000 paintings before them. The 30 that were chosen took their places among the 466 that were invited to be judged by an international committee.

This year the final committee contained no great international figure. Last year Henri Matisse was on the jury and his good friend Pablo Ruiz Picasso won first prize (TIME, Oct. 20, 1930). This year, beside the U.S. members, foreign artists on the jury were the Fascist Painter Cipriano Efisio Oppo, Britain's Paul Nash, France's Henry Eugene Le Sidaner. And for the first time since 1923 first prize went to a U. S. painter. Better, first prize went to one of the 30 unknown who had not been invited. Philadelphia, defeated in the World's Series, consoled itself with a new unknown hero to match St. Louis' Pepper Martin. Franklin C. Watkins of Philadelphia won the first Carnegie prize of $1.500 and also the Albert C. Lehman prize of $2,000 for the best purchasable painting. Hero Watkins' prizewinner was a large oval canvas entitled "Suicide in Costume." It showed the body of a grimacing clown with a smoking revolver clutched in one hand, sprawled over a bed. In manner it was a little reminiscent of the late great George Bellows and Jean Louis Forain.

Almost the only important living British painter not represented at Pittsburgh last week was Augustus John who entered the week's news by finishing, after three years of hastily snatched sittings, a portrait of fox-bearded Governor Montagu Collet Norman of the Bank of England. Between the time the face was sketched in charcoal and the final varnish was applied Governor Norman's beard changed from grey to white.

Suggestion for Mr. Rockefeller

Like 16th Century conquistadores, European and U. S. intelligentsia have spent the past two years discovering Mexico. Mexico's modern painters, Mexico's folk arts, Mexico's archeological remains have been the subject of innumerable books and pamphlets, even of flights by Charles Augustus Lindbergh & wife. Latest to join the parade is Dr. Elie Faure, famed French critic, parlor anarchist, author of the most readable if not the most authoritative history of art. Recently he arrived in Los Angeles fresh from a visit to Mexico, on his way to Japan, and delivered an address to the California Art Club which appeared for the first time last week in the pages of The Art Digest. Therein he suggested a few things that John D. Rockefeller Jr. might do with his money. Said Critic Faure:

"We are now passing from a period of individual to one of collective expression. . . . Today we are less insistent on playing solo parts, and begin to be content with playing one part in the general orchestra. . . ." During my recent sojourn in Mexico I found startling confirmation of my ideas. There as I observed the impressive monuments of Toltec architecture, I stood in the presence of a great collective expression. ... In this connection I cannot understand why Americans who give millions for the restoration of Versailles, do not spend a few millions for the excavation of the uncounted temples in Central America and for the establishment of museums which might be the greatest in the world.* You have at your gates an Egypt, but 20 times greater. . . ."

*Mr. Rockefeller gave $2,600,000 between 1924 and 1927 for the restoration of Versailles, Fontainebleau and Rheims Cathedral.

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