Prix de Rome

Henri E. Chabanne of Tompkins Corners, N. Y. won the Prix de Rome award in landscape architecture last week for his solution of the problem: "The development of an addition to a private estate." The announcement caused excitement because Landscape Architect Chabanne never went to Yale, has nothing to do with the Yale School of Fine Arts. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, has been working for a year with the Taconic State Park Commission at Poughkeepsie, N. Y.

Yale made up for this in the other departments. The Prix de Rome in Architecture went to George Nelson of the Yale School of Fine Arts. The Prix de Rome in Sculpture went to Robert Johnson McKnight of the Yale School of Fine Arts. The Prix de Rome in Painting went to James Owen Mahoney Jr. of the Yale School of Fine Arts, making the eighth successive year that Yale has won the painting award.

For many years students of rival academies have referred to the Prix de Rome painters as "Little Savages" (TIME, May 19, 1930, May 18, 1931). By this they refer to Yale's Leffingwell Professor of Painting & Design, bristle-lipped Eugene Francis Savage, a muralist best known as the decorator of that amazing fane, the Elks National Memorial in Chicago. Professor Savage is an active member of the Fine Arts committee of the American Academy in Rome. Almost all recent winners of the Prix de Rome have painted in the manner of Eugene Francis Savage. Finding little in their own time to interest them, "Little Savages" paint greenish, many-muscled nudes in extravagant attitudes before Italianate backgrounds of rolling hills, almond blossoms, firmly white Tuscan oxen.

Yale authorities deny that Professor Savage has any particular influence over the Prix de Rome and its winners. They point out that Professor Savage is a very intermittent teacher at Yale, and that, though a trustee, Professor Savage is not a member of the Prix de Rome jury. The eight consecutive winners were really students under Professors Edwin C. Taylor and Deane Keller (a "Little Savage" in 1926) who teach the way Professor Savage paints.

James Owen Mahoney Jr., latest winner, was born in Dallas 24 years ago, graduated from Southern Methodist University before going to Yale. Twice he has won prizes for the Beaux Arts Ball program cover. His winning canvas is entitled Sunday Afternoon. It shows a U. S. family of the Iron Stag era grouped round a little ornamental fountain on a croquet lawn. The models this time have all their clothes on. The painting has considerably more humor than most Prix de Rome projects. But there remain the same studio attitudes of the figures, the same theatrical treatment of background. Critics found it still a little Savage. To those who saw the work of other candidates from other schools there could be no suggestion that the jury (Artists Barry Faulkner, Allyn Cox, Ezra Winter, James Monroe Hewlett, Abram Poole, Gari Melchers) was biased in its decision. The Yale School of Fine Arts may be imitative, slightly archaic, but it does give its pupils a knowledge of drawing and the use of paint apparently unequalled in other college art schools.

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