Eye-Burner

Even an invitation to exhibit in Pittsburgh's Carnegie Annual is considered an accolade; its first prize is the top U.S. painting honor. For this year's show, most of the 300 chosen U.S. artists were out of art's second drawer, but they were the best available these days. Visitors who plodded through the exhibition on opening day last week agreed that the paintings had nothing in common except craftsmanship--and perhaps mediocrity.

The $1,500 first prize went to thin-faced Zoltan Sepeshy, who at 49 is one of the world's best tempera technicians. His realistic landscapes, figure paintings and still lifes incline to be dull in color, but they have space, weight and solidity. And Sepeshy can reproduce the texture of almost anything in nature--from the barnacles on a beached boat to the faint down on a woman's neck. Says he: "I love the fine, eye-burning work involved. . . A friend tells me that my work is immaculate in everything but conception."

Sepeshy had titled his prizewinning picture Marine Still Life. An intricate tangle of moorings, anchors, buoys and boats, it was laboriously pieced together from sketches made at Frankfort harbor, on Lake Michigan. Last year's winner--Karl Knath's abstract Gear--had been similarly composed from sketches of the Provincetown waterfront, but Sepeshy's was far more recognizable.

Born in Hungary, Sepeshy came to the U.S. in 1921, spent some ten years house painting, lumber stacking and window dressing, finally married a girl "as blonde and as genuine as a sand dune," and discovered to his surprise that he could make a living and even support a family (two children) by teaching art. Now he heads the Department of Painting at Michigan's progressive Cranbrook Academy. It was a teacher who gave Sepeshy his first incentive to become an artist. "If I hadn't wanted to 'show' that drawing teacher who had flunked me."

Sepeshy remembers, "I might never have insisted that my parents let me study art."

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