Big Biennale

Biggest international art fair in the world is the 61-year-old Venice Biennale, held on the quarter-mile stretch of pavilions that was once Venice's marine arsenal. This year the show is bigger than ever before -more than 5,000 works of art from 34 nations -but critics last week were grumbling that the "Biennale is going downhill." Wrote Italian Critic Leonardo Borgese: "The show leaves. . . a sense of emptiness and bitterness, a sense of humiliation; one feels all are guilty, and does not know precisely why." Replied an Italian museum director: "Whenever the critics are so angry, it indicates something important is going on."

Just what was going on, however, fairgoers and critics were at a loss to say. The Russians, back in their refurbished Muscovite pavilion for the first time since 1932, drew the biggest crowds. But the official, Stalin-period art (stocky peasant girls laughingly sheafing wheat) soon drove them away. The U.S. exhibit (TIME, June 18), which collected no prizes, was a hit, mainly because it stuck to one theme: "The City.'' Best that could be said: the Biennale was immense.

The task of sampling the whole ragout, then awarding the prizes, fell to a 30-man international jury. After days of wrangling, their decisions (on majority vote):

P: Painting Prize ($2,400): to France's Jacques Villon, 80 (TIME, June 6, 1955), who showed 38 paintings. Early Cubist Villon (who changed his name from Duchamp to hide his early art activity from his stern Normandy father) is a member of a long-famous painting family, which includes his brothers, Cubist Sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel (Nude Descending a Staircase) Duchamp. For years Jacques Villon was out of the limelight, working as a newspaper cartoonist and engraver. He began achieving belated recognition when he won first prize in the 1950 Carnegie International.

P: Sculpture Prize ($2,400): to Britain's London-born Lynn Chadwick, 41, whose early mobile efforts were rated inferior to those by U.S. Sculptor Alexander Calder and whose welded sculpture ran second place to Britain's Reg Butler. This year Chadwick (who works mostly in iron) moved into the lead with his 19 angular, spiky sculptures that came close to being the hit of the Biennale. One of the most discussed works: Inner Eye (see cut), a 7-ft. iron structure with a quartz crystal gripped on spiked arms. It looked alarmingly like a radar man from Mars.

P: Engraving Prize ($400): to Japan's Shiko Munakata, 53, short, unshaven and extremely nearsighted, famed for his rough, violent drawing technique, who showed six engravings.

P: Drawing Prize ($400) : to Brazil's Aldemir Martins, 34, for his six clean-lined drawings, which included birds and human figures that won his prize in this year's Sao Paulo Bienal.

One award had the jury stopped: an $800 prize donated by Rome's Obelisco Gallery for the "most nonconformist" work. After surveying the field (including a blank, punctured canvas and an 18-in.-square sheet of rusted metal punctured by 3-in. nails on which were impaled two pingpong balls), the international jury gave up, decided that the task of picking only one was impossible.

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