110th Academy

Puffing nervously at a thin cigar, vigorous, talkative Jonas Lie (pronounced Lee) strode about the galleries of the National Academy of Design, of which he is president, last week on the Academy's 110th varnishing day. Buttonholing critics and newshawks he kept insisting :

"Don't be too hard on this year's show, will you, boys ! I don't care what you say about next year's, but this year we really have tried to pep things up, we've done our best."

Loyally therefore, critics suppressed the usual cliches about the backwardness, the stodginess of all Academies. And with considerable justice. To the quick glance of a gallerygoer the walls looked about the same, but Norway-born Artist Lie had done about as much as one person in one season could do to enliven the Academy. Prizewinners, announced fortnight ago (TIME, March 18), were familiar to the public before the show opened. Almost all of them were painted in the modern idiom. Instead of the exhausting acres of mediocrity of previous shows, only 260 oils were on view, and among them were exhibitors few expected to find there: Surrealist Peter Blume (TIME, Nov. 26, et seq.), Reginald Marsh, John Steuart Curry, Guy Pene du Bois. etc.

There were still plenty of pictures to make old Academicians feel at home. As he has many times before, Frederick J. Waugh won the Palmer Memorial Prize for Marine painting with another of his standard scenes of breaking waves and rocks. There were at least half a dozen other pictures by other wave painters exactly like it.

Candidate for the most banal picture was a meat-calendarish illustration of Putnam Called From the Plow by John Ward Dunsmore, A. N. A. Slickest portrait was a huge, brittle canvas by Paul Trebilcock of the much publicized Morgan sisters, Mrs. Reginald Vanderbilt and Thelma, Viscountess Furness. Among the best pictures passed over by the prize committee were Taxes, a desolate study of an abandoned farm by the former PWAP head Edward Bruce, and Jes Schlaikjer's The Cooling Well, a woman and child bending over a well head on a South Dakota farm on a hot summer evening.

The first thoroughgoing scandal in the Academy's 110 years occurred three months ago when an Academician was expelled in disgrace (TIME, Dec. 17). Stephen Bransgrove was an Australian scene painter who had won the Ellin P. Speyer prize for animal portraiture in 1933 with a canvas which he had copied stroke for stroke from a colored reproduction in a British magazine. The animal prize was awarded this year to a heavy plaster statue of a pelican swallowing a fish, by the eminently reputable Bruce Moore.

If Banker-Painter-New Dealer Edward Bruce was given no prize last week, he was as fully rewarded by being elected an associate member of the Academy. So were 14 others. Among them: Painter Maurice Sterne, Architect Paul P. Cret, Illustrator Everett Shinn, Sculptor Hilda Kristina Lascari, only woman to be made an A. N. A. this year.

Academician Shinn, busy with a play he is trying to write and with a one-man show of his paintings in another Manhattan gallery (TIME, March 11), did not bother to send a picture to this year's Academy. Nor did his election impress him.

"That," said he, "is just something that happened after the Academy stopped growing fungi out of its ears."

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