Biggest Fellowships

The newest and handsomest fellowships in the arts and architecture field were announced last week in Chicago by the $5,000,000 Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Aim of the new foundation, which draws its funds from the estate of bigtime Chicago Builder Ernest Robert Graham, who died in 1936,* is to give artists, architects and critics of already proved ability a year off to work on special projects of their own choosing.

All of the first nine winners of $10,000 each easily met Graham's desire that recipients be up to "postgraduate work." The winners, chosen with the help of an all-star advisory committee of top architects, museum directors and Swiss Art and Architecture Historian Sigfried Giedion: Sculptor-Welders Harry Bertoia, 41, of Barto, Pa., Joseph Goto, 36, of Chicago and Keith Monroe, 39, of San Francisco; Painter Walter Kuhlman, 38, of San Francisco; Architects Frederick Kiesler, 64, of New York City and Paul Nelson, 62, an American now practicing in Paris; Painter-Film-Maker James Edward Davis, 55, of Princeton, N.J.; Chicago Photographer Harry Callahan, 44, and French Critic Jean Leymarie, 37.

Graham fellows in the arts will be free to go back to college, travel abroad, or continue working at home. Only requirement is that they attend a two-month round-table "Institute on the Arts" in Chicago. "What the artist or scholar produces in the year is unimportant," says Director William E. Hartmann, managing partner of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill architectural branch in Chicago. "What is important--and this is our goal--is the hope that we can help each recipient further his or her individual artistic development."

*Graham's original $2,950,000 endowment drew so little revenue during Depression years that the foundation waited 20 years to start operations.

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