Prizewinners

In the days when Pittsburgh's art show, the Carnegie International, was really international, only a handful of Americans could break in. France's Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Derain usually won top honors. During the war, Carnegie went all-American. Last week, in its Romanesque stone-pile set in Pittsburgh's Schenley Park, the Carnegie Institute put on what will presumably be its last purely U.S. show, and invited 350 U.S. artists--the most ever--to show their wares. It was still, in prestige at least, the biggest annual U.S. art event, as it has been since 1896.

Carnegie, 1945, included a high quota of businessmen in smocks--artists who paint merely pleasant pictures merely for the market--but it also showed what the country's best painters were up to. Very few seemed content to imitate the European "masters" or to ride the rickety bandwagons of faddist art. Even fewer were producing stuff worth imitating. Their most successful efforts had neither the excitement of Paris art, nor the significance of Mexico's Government-sponsored murals; but they did show a groping sincerity, a heartening attempt to be themselves.

A conservative jury of museum directors gave $1,000 top honors to long-faced, Canadian-born Philip Guston, now an art instructor at St. Louis' Washington University. His Sentimental Moment is a sentimental study of a plump-armed, dreamy girl for which he used no model. "I simply had it in my mind and transferred it to canvas." Guston, who is 33, was a factory worker and a truck driver until WPA came along and gave him a full-time chance to work at art. Of his Sentimental Moment, the New York Times's ponderously judicious Edward Alden Jewell wrote: "There is a kind of 'museum look' about it. . . . I should never have considered it a painting likely to be deemed of prize caliber."

The $700 second prize went to beefy George Grosz for his The Survivor, a carefully painted war nightmare. Grosz, whose acid commentaries on World War I, and the social evils which followed in Germany, earned him international fame and the hatred of the Nazis, became a U.S. citizen in 1938, settled down in Douglas Manor, N.Y. to paint heavily larded nudes and Cape Cod sand dunes. When his old fears and disgusts overtake him, he is still a frightening artist.

Third prize went to Franklin C. Watkins, who won a Carnegie first against tougher competition in 1931. His Portrait of J. Stogdell Stokes succeeded in looking stodgy without being academic. Honorable mentions included Samuel Rosenberg's geometric portrait of Israel; O. Louis Guglielmi's The River, featuring hind views of three girls looking at the water, and The Quarantined Citadel, by onetime Etonian Philip Evergood. Evergood describes Citadel as "a vicious painting which represents an imaginary island where military aggressors are dumped so that they can play at war."

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