Art: 37th International

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Each summer, to the smoke-blackened, pseudo-Renaissance pile of the Carnegie Institute at Pittsburgh come canvases from all over Europe and the U. S. for the Carnegie International, world's biggest competitive show of contemporary painting. In the Institute's galleries they are expertly hung by Jack Nash, a slight, nervous, white-pated ex-jockey. Once the jury of award did the hanging, but for the past 20 years Director Homer Saint-Gaudens has given the job to Jack, who pays small heed to names, more to effect. Jack has seen enough Carnegie juries in action to learn what the public never learns: what artists think of painting. Each year he employs his knowledge to guess the winner before the judges arrive. This year he picked U. S. Painter Alexander Brook's Georgia Jungle, a Negro family against a drab landscape of rain-washed fields and shanties.

Last month an international jury of artists* examined the 348 pictures Jack Nash had hung. Each judge had 15 stickers the first day and seven slips of paper the second, strolled through the galleries, licking, sticking, narrowing down the field for the final choices. Last week 5,000 well-dressed people surged up the Institute's broad marble stairs to open Pittsburgh's social season and the 37th International. They spent more time looking at each other than they did at the pictures. But all of them at least glanced at Georgia Jungle. Jack Nash, as usual, had been right. It had won the $1,000 first prize.

For the first time in years, the U. S. walked off with five of the eight Carnegie prizes, and did it with a true melting-pot flourish. Second prize went to Yasuo Kuniyoshi; second, third and fourth honorable mentions to Raphael Soyer, Aaron Bohrod and Ernest Fiene, U. S. artists all, though only Brook and Bohrod are native-born. Russian Marc Chagall, Spanish Mariano Andréu and Parisian Maurice Brianchon, who all paint in France, won the three remaining prizes.

As usual, critics mourned that the right artists were being honored at the wrong time. More direct cause for mourning came from the fact that this will be the last Carnegie International until the end of World War II. War I stopped the show for six years; Depression hit it in 1932.

Portly, jovial Alexander Brook, 41, took the news of his prize calmly. He has been giving shows, winning medals, selling pictures to museums for 17 years. For even longer he has been married to sharp-nosed, sharp-witted Caricaturist Peggy Bacon. Artist Brook painted Georgia Jungle on a trip to Savannah last winter, finished it in three or four days. At Los Angeles, where he is teaching at the Otis Art Institute, Painter Brook told an interviewer last week: "To me it was a sad scene, and I guess I like sad things. . . . What does anyone do with $1,000? Pay bills, I guess."