Arts: International Exhibition

Homer Saint-Gaudens, Director of Fine Arts at Carnegie Institute, announced the decision of the six judges sitting on the jury of awards for the Institute's International Exhibition. The jury members were: Pierre Bonnard of Paris, Giovanni Romagnoli of Bologna, Charles Sims of London, and three U. S. artists: Charles W. Hawthorne, Howard Giles and Gifford Beal. It is amazing what a lot of thunder the Institute is able to stir up every year over the award of a first prize of $1,500, a second of $1,000, and a third of $500. But even if the amounts were not, perhaps, sumptuous, they were very gratefully received by Ferruccio Ferrazzi, K. X. Roussel, and Robert Spencer, an American.

Artist Spencer, though a Harvard man, never cared for Boston. He was born in Harvard, Neb., lives now in New Hope, Pa., has studied under Chase and Henri, is a member of the National Academy. His picture "Mountebanks and Thieves" depicts U. S. slum life with its gay devil-may-care foreground, and the gaunt bleak tenements, brooding, relentless in the background.

Critics wondered whether the judges had not given Artist Spencer the prize because they thought an American ought to have such financial assistance. Nor would a jury of critics ever have given first place to Ferrazzi's "Horatia and Fabiola"; they would have chosen the obvious and imposing qualities of Mrs. Ernest Prostor's "The Back Bedroom." You can only see a corner of the bedroom. A girl with a primitive face and a fine supple body leans over the back of a chair. The skin has texture; the pose understanding; but over it all, the simplicity, the strong drive of the light into the picture, is something too glib, a derived accent. A jury of critics would have chosen it; the Carnegie's jury of painters gave it only an honorable mention, as they gave Antoine Faistauer's exceedingly competent "Old Village, Menton" and John Carroll's pretty illustration "Man With Guitar." (Would it, one critic demanded, have been too laborious to call this picture "A Man With a Guitar"?) Only a jury of painters would have discerned the subtlety of Ferrazzi's tall Italian woman, by far the best picture in the exhibition, which by an odd chance received first prize. From what tall church window did she steal the gown she wore the morning Ferrazzi thought of her, standing beside an open door? The woman, leading a baby girl, is about to go from one room into another. She is a woman of this age. Yet you have a feeling that in the room to which, next moment, she will go, Fra Lippo Lippi is eating toasted chestnuts and cursing genially because his model is late.

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