You Can't Lose

There were 156 paintings in Pepsi-Cola's annual roundup of U.S. art which opened in Manhattan this week, and every single painting won a prize. It seemed like an ideal way to spend money (more than $41,000) without hurting anyone's feelings very much.

The four top winners got from $2,500 to $1,000 apiece; everybody else collected $100. Thrown in for good measure were four $1,500 fellowships and ten medals of honor designed by Sculptor William Zorach.

Was the exhibit worth it? To make sure that it would be, Pepsi had screened the 156 final canvases through six juries of artists and museum men (Exhibit Director Roland McKinney served on all six). The resulting show, which ran the gamut from naturalism to sheer abstraction, contained very few duds. It proved again the energy, variety and competence of a number of U.S. painters, known and unknown, doing their work in all parts of the country. Among the standouts:

P: Peter Kurd's open-air portrait of his daughter Carol glowed with paternal warmth and offered a modern object lesson in the egg-tempera technique of the Renaissance masters.

P: Manhattan's George L. K. Morris contributed an abstraction as tasteful as any in the show, though it demonstrated how academic abstractionism can get. Entitled New Year's Eve on Broadway, it might almost have been painted 30 years ago--on Montmartre--if the signboards had read Vin and Tabac instead of Four Roses and Camels.

P: Massachusetts' Gardner Cox is known chiefly for pretty portraits. This time he sent in a painting entitled Cathedral, which appeared to represent a boulder seen through a pane of glass. Complex and painted in dull browns and greys, it was designed not so much to catch the eye as to hold it.

P: Maurice Sterne's Approaching Storm and William Thon's Life Saving Station looked bigger than they actually were. Each was a first-rate example of a kind of impressionism U.S. painters seem to excel at--somber, broadly painted pictures of nature in turmoil.

Another such painting, which might strike laymen as being neither better nor worse than the rest, won this year's top prize. Insisted Director McKinney: "The finest picture in the whole show." It was a sodden, ragged and barren landscape under a strawberry-tinted sky, done by a soft-spoken 32-year-old Virginian named Mitchell Jamieson. To Painter Jamieson, in Paris last week on a Guggenheim Fellowship to study European masters, the news hit the spot. "I planned on going to an art exhibition with my wife this afternoon," he said when he was asked about it, "but now I guess we'll go to the nearest bar."

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