Art: Radio Plugs

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Twice last week national radio hookups were used to plug Manhattan art shows.

Five days before the opening of the National Academy of Design's noth annual exhibition President Jonas Lie gave an elaborately rehearsed interview over a coast-to-coast network, in which he announced the winners of the $4,400 worth of assorted prizes that the N. A. has assembled through the years. Nobody could see the pictures last week, but from the names and reputations of the winners all the U. S. art world knew that the long-awaited rejuvenation of the National Academy was under way. Except for elderly, conservative Frederick Judd Waugh of Provincetown, Mass, who won, as he has before, the $500 Edwin Palmer memorial prize for marine painting (TIME, Dec. 17), other prize-winners were artists who would have been considered rank radicals by academicians of 25 years ago. Among them were:

Leon Kroll, who took the $1,000 Altman prize for landscapes. His canvas entitled Cape Ann was an excellent picture of three young people in bathing trunks, sweaters, bathrobes, done with all the artist's flair for the human figure.

Jean MacLane, who won the $1,000 Altman prize for the best genre painting with her canvas Tennis Days. In it were to be seen two athletic-looking girls wearing bandannas and two tanned, crop-headed boys in tennis garb.

Childe Hassam, to whom went the Saltus Medal of Merit, only N. A. prize to be awarded regardless of nationality, age, sex, or subject matter, for that old post-impressionist's landscape Evening, Point Alien.

Maurice Sterne, art theorist and Brooklyn expatriate (TIME, Feb. 27, 1933) who won the $100 Thomas B. Clarke prize for the best U. S. figure composition painted in the U. S. or its territorial possessions, with his Plum Girl.

Jerry Farnsworth, able Cape Cod portraitist, whose Jan de Groot took the $150 Thomas R. Proctor Prize for the best portrait in the show.

Two days before the N. A. prize-winners were blindly announced over the air, a national radio audience was urgently invited to visit another Manhattan art show and inspect, at the Arthur U. Newton Galleries, a set of portraits by a small, kinetic, kinky-haired Pole named Stanislav Rembski. Most of those who accepted the invitation, however, went less to see a slick icy canvas of Dr. Frank Damrosch or a promising self-portrait of the artist than to have a good long look at a brand new picture of a smiling, self-confident, wispy-haired man of 45 in a blue serge suit. For the past two and a half years that man has solaced thousands of uncertain minds by broadcasting homely advice as THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE. His sponsors over the Columbia network: Wasey Products (Musterole, Kreml Hair Tonic, and a brace of nostrums known as Zemo and Haley's CTC, for stomach acidity). Last week it was the Voice of Experience who turned his first discussion of Art into neat plug for the Rembski show in general and his own portrait in particular.