Chicago v. Pittsburgh

Two of the biggest annual events of U.S. art popped in the same fortnight: in Chicago, one of the most distinguished U.S. exhibitions of the Chicago Art Institute's history; in Pittsburgh, one of the largest exhibitions of second-rate art ever hung by an important U.S. museum.

Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute show (formerly the Carnegie International), since the late Andrew Carnegie founded it in 1896, has been U.S. art's Kentucky Derby, up to now has been rated above Chicago's show. This year both exhibitions changed their rules. Pittsburgh went democratic, announced that it would accept only the works of U.S. artists who had never before been represented in its big shindig. Chicago went exclusive, skimmed only the cream off this year's crop of U.S. painting and sculpture. Result : Chicago's was better worth seeing.

Chicago's show owed its quality to a year of careful sifting and choosing by the Art Institute's dapper Director Daniel Catton Rich. Aware that artists are not always the best judges of their own work, Director Rich and a staff of assistants kept an eye on Manhattan exhibitions, spent months touring New England, the South and Southwest, to find exactly what they wanted. When Director Rich had finished, he had hand-picked 276 items of painting and sculpture by well-known and unknown U.S. artists.

First prize at Chicago ($750) went to New York's Russian-born, patriarchal Max Weber, who is regarded with almost religious veneration by his fellow painters. He was doing somber Cezanne-like landscapes and gloomy Picassoish nudes and rabbis before most U.S. modern artists had abstracted their first cube. Painter Weber's prize-winning entry, a ruggedly outlined, moody landscape called Winter Twilight, showed a pair of gaunt tree trunks grimly clutching an overcast sky before a background of cliffs and buildings.

The Logan prize ($500) went to Manhattan Sculptor Oronzio Maldarelli for a smooth-cheeked limestone portrait head. Chicago's Ivan Le Lorraine Albright got a $500 prize for a queer, meticulously detailed picture of the door of a mortuary chamber. He called it That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do.

Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute show, 302 paintings chosen from the entries of 4,812 little-knowns and unknowns, turned out to be mainly a clutter of imitative and not-too-expert oils. But it did plow up a handful of unrecognized U.S. talent. And many of its prize-losers seemed as good jobs of painting as the show possessed.

Pittsburgh's first prize ($1,000) went to an artist who had never had an exhibition, 41-year-old, Denver-born Tom Loftin Johnson. His prize-winning American Piet`a, which was once refused by Manhattan's National Academy show, was a skillfully drawn, mural-like scene showing Negroes bearing home the corpse of a lynched relative. No one was more surprised at the $1,000 it earned than Painter Johnson himself. Said he: "I don't know quite how it happened. The money came in very good because I have no job."

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