Try Again

For the past two years the top prize money for U.S. artists has been not the famed Carnegie International but Pepsi-Cola's "Portrait of America" contest. But Pepsi-Cola's President Walter S. Mack Jr. has not been a happy man. Try as he did to stay behind the curtains and let a group of painters run the show, painters and critics alike seemed inclined to gang up on him as a soda-pop Medici, a bumbling Borgia (TIME, Dec. 31).

Last week Mack, complaining that he had "been in the hands of others," announced a new strategy for giving away $25,750 a year without getting slapped for doing it. Pepsi's 1946 contest will have a new name: "Paintings of the Year" (to avoid the taunts of jingoism that "Portrait of America" got); a new director: balding, milk-mild Roland McKinney, ex-director of Los Angeles' County Museum. There will still be plenty of prize money ($15,250), but also seven "fellowships in painting" ($10,500), so that winners can go and do better.

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