Prize Day

With the fattest melon to cut in many a year, the National Academy of Design opened its 111th exhibition in Manhattan last week, showed 530 paintings, prints and pieces of sculpture, awarded $4,250 in prizes to 15 different artists.

President Jonas Lie won a gold medal for himself with a picture of Maine fishing boats in a rising mist entitled The Curtain Rises.

The Ellin P. Speyer Prize ($300) for "a portrayal of humaneness toward animals," was given, after due thought, to Sculptor Gertrude K. Lathrop for a statue of a woolly lamb.

Critics were thunderstruck to learn that the $500 Palmer Prize for marine painting went to one Hayley Lever of Caldwell, N.J. and not to that persistent and popular sea painter, Frederick Waugh (TIME, Dec. 17, 1934 et seq.). Possibly the fact that Artist Waugh's entry entitled Ante Meridian (the one with the surf on the right) had already won one prize last December may have affected the judges.

Most generally approved of all the prizes was the award of the $200 Hallgarten Prize "for the best oil painting by a citizen under 35," to Maurice Blumenfeld for a gloomy Daumieresque canvas of three cadaverous men hunched over a table, bolting soup. Citizen Blumenfeld turned out to be a 17-year-old Brooklyn high-school graduate. Though born in France of Russian parents, he was technically eligible to receive the prize since his father has become a naturalized U. S. citizen.

The judges awarded four instead of the usual two Altman prizes to U. S.-born citizens. Most important of the Altman prizes ($700) went to Sidney E. Dickinson, conservative portraitist and onetime art instructor, for a curious canvas entitled The Pale Rider. Apparently having listened to much talk about surrealism, Artist Dickinson did a picture of a morose young woman in a red dress seated on a falling, pedestal by a table loaded with books. A Negro in a grey flannel shirt is pulling a heavy tarpaulin over the whole composition while three white roses fall from the sky. The Pale Rider is disappearing into the sunset. Since the whole is painted with the stodgy technique of a bank president's portrait, the effect is as surprising as would be the sight of Herbert Hoover blowing a tenor saxophone.

"I haven't the slightest idea what it is about," admitted President Lie, "but we liked the way it was painted."

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