"It Must Be Bad"

"If more than 10% of the population likes a picture," George Bernard Shaw once remarked, "it should be burned, for it must be bad." On this theory--which most art critics are too polite to concur with, out loud--Indiana's 31-year-old John Rogers Cox might as well burn his studio down. Last week he walked off again with the Carnegie Annual's $200 popularity prize.

Carnegie's judges had voted $1,000 first prize to Cape Cod Abstractionist Karl Knaths for a knotty grey-green what-is-it entitled Gear (TIME, Oct. 21). But when the gallerygoers' ballots were all in, they had voted, as they did in 1944, for conservative Cox. Cox's highly stylized brand of the bucolic--a plush wheat field under an exploding cloud--had the same kind of crowd appeal as the seascapes of the late Frederick J. Waugh (Waugh won the Carnegie popularity prize five years running).

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