Art: Racial Strength

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Atlanta's annual exhibition of painting and sculpture by Negroes has become one of the features of the art year. This year's show, held in the library of Atlanta University (for Negroes), was the tenth, and the best yet. From 17 states 89 artists contributed, tried for $1,400 in prizes.

The awards indicated the stylistic range of the show, which was held together by what one Atlantan called "an almost frightening racial strength and feeling." Brooklyn's Merton Simpson won the top landscape prize with a near-abstraction called Landscape Symphony. Top money-winner ($300) was String Dance, a relatively academic study by Walter A. Simon, teacher at Virginia State College.

The Quiet One, by 32-year-old William Artis, dominated the sculpture section. A technical sergeant in the Mediterranean theater during the war, Artis came home to study with Ivan Mestrovic, the expatriate Yugoslav sculptor (TIME, Aug. 30, 1948) at Syracuse University. Mestrovic,' who knows as well as any man living how to make statues look like monuments instead of stone dummies, imparted some of his secret to Artis. The Quiet One (inspired by a documentary movie of the same name about childhood maladjustment in Harlem) is a quiet, beautifully compact monument to a Negro boy who sits withdrawn, miserable and taut with life.