Pittsburgh Prizewinners

The title of the show was hard to digest, and the contents even harder. When the 1961 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture opened at the Carnegie Institute last week, it put on display 329 paintings and 116 sculptures by 441 artists from 29 countries. Most of the work was abstract, with each abstractionist striving for some idiom of his own. This striving, which in a one-man show often makes each work seem like every other, has the opposite effect in a group show like the Carnegie's. There the effect is not of monotony but of sense-assaulting variety.

The top prize for painting went to Seattle's Veteran Abstractionist Mark Tobey (see color). Tobey, now 71, first got hooked on what he calls "white writing" during a trip to China where he became fascinated by the age-old romance between calligraphy and painting. He began to see nature not as a cluster of shapes but as rhythm and vitality expressed in racing lines. At first glance Tobey's canvases sometimes seem like decorative screens, with nature hidden somewhere behind. Actually they are just the opposite: examined closely, they become a battleground of forces whose struggles extend into realms the eye cannot even see.

Lonely Question Mark. Even more prestigious than Tobey is the top sculptor, Swiss-born Alberto Giacometti of Paris. Giacometti once declared that he wanted his figures to be "immense." But in working on them, he is almost always driven to whittling them down to emaciation, as if he were looking for some elusive essence inside one layer of flesh after another. His figures seem still to be searching for that essence long after they leave his studio, eternal and lonely question marks.

Like the two first-prize winners ($3,000 each), the two third-prize winners ($1,000) have long and solid reputations:

Sculptor David Smith, whose pieces are among the best of welded sculpture; and Painter Adolph Gottlieb, whose canvases --usually some sort of calm circular form hovering near a frenetic, torn-looking shape--are getting to be a bit repetitious. Curiously, it was the two second-prize winners ($1,500) who simultaneously made their debut in the big time.

Powerful Paintwork. Russian-born Jules Olitski, 39, studied portrait painting at the National Academy of Design in Manhattan, went to Paris on the G.I. Bill and worked under Ossip Zadkine, now lives in Northport, Long Island. His work has gradually become more and more abstract, but even as he retreats from reality, he manages to put into his canvases the throb of life. His winning work (see color) expresses to him "the intense silence of a kiss," which accounts for its improbable title. It is more successful not as an expression of emotion but as a powerful piece of paintwork--billowing blues, slashed by molten yellow, floating in a sea of blackness.

Sculptor George Sugarman did not take up art until ten years ago, but he too managed to study under Zadkine with the help of the G.I. Bill. Sugarman early decided that too many modern sculptors had taken to the welding torch, so he began working in wood. He saws, carves and chisels, but mostly he builds up his sculptures bit by bit by lamination. While his winning piece looks a bit like an animal of some sort, it is really a series of separate abstract forms strung together, each one having suggested the next. As Sugarman explains it, his sculptures are not "composed" but "juxtaposed." As such, though they sometimes seem to get out of hand, they have an undeniable if homemade vitality.

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