Ladies' Day

When the judges in the 57th annual exhibition of Chicago artists added up the prizes they had awarded this year, they made a surprising discovery: the women had run off with all the top painting honors of the show. Women artists won the three main awards for painting, took nine of the exhibition's total of 18 prizes. Last week Chicagoans were flocking in at the rate of 1,000 daily to see the prizewinning works.

Margo Hoff, a handsome, grey-haired woman in her late 30s, took the show's grand prize of $1,000 (and a medal) for a striking vertical composition called Stage Fright -- the terror an actor feels on looking out at row on row of tensely waiting faces in the audience. To achieve the effect of tenseness, Artist Hoff made her faces green, set against a background of red plush seats and surrounded by an ominous. midnight-blue black.

Second prize of $750 went to Joyce Treiman, 31, a cheerful, redheaded Winnetka housewife. Her winner was a highly colorful semi-abstraction called Circus Cyclists II, in which acrobatic cyclists, painted in green, loomed out of a circular composition bold with rich reds and blues.

Third prize for painting ($500) went to Elizabeth Engelhard, a fragile little lady of 60 who is the mother of three grown daughters. Her entry was Design for Security, a triangular construction of children clinging together, surrounded by a cloud of light yellows and reds. Explained Artist Engelhard, who has been painting since 1899: "I think it was just a feeling of colors going off into a mist with the children sort of bewildered."

Why had the women done so well? One of the exhibition judges, Painter Francis Chapin (TIME, March 23), offered his own explanation: "It seems so many women won because they were hard workers, not tremendously experimental, and sound painters."

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