Piatigorsky in Pittsburgh

A savory, romantic portrait of the cello virtuoso Gregor Piatigorsky won first prize last week at Pittsburgh's annual Carnegie Institute Exhibition, wartime successor to the famed Carnegie International show. The $1,000 prize winner is by 60-year-old, Indiana-born Wayman Adams, since 1926 a member of the archconservative National Academy, who first showed his Piatigorsky last year at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. In the past, Carnegie judges have sometimes recognized painting of decided originality, such as Peter Blume's South of Scranton. This year's safe & sane first choice prompted one observer to wisecrack: "The judges may know a lot about art, but do they know what they like?"

The second prize of $700 went to 40-year-old Robert Gwathmey, art teacher at Manhattan's Cooper Union, for a postery agricultural study called Hoeing. Third prize of $500 went to 28-year-old John Rogers Cox for White Cloud, a stylized, theatrically lighted farm scene under a lone, spectacular cumulus vapor.

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