No Jury

What the scrappy, all-inclusive Society of Independent Artists is to Manhattan, the No-Jury Society of Artists is to Chicago. Last month the 12th annual No-Jury show was scheduled to exhibit its 393 pictures in a large room on The Fair store's eighth floor. Last week, after a controversy on matters of artistic propriety had been waged between the No-Jury exhibition directors and the store's executives, the 200 artists picked up their canvases, walked out of The Fair ("A Great Store in a Great City"), opened their show instead in an old mansion on Lake Shore Drive.

Disagreement came when the store's department heads saw Macena Barton's $1,000 Modern Olympia, a reclining, nude young woman with scarlet toenails and a small, black crucifix. The model, Cati Mount, had been one of the attractions at Chicago's Century of Progress, but the Executive Committee well knew that the picture would offend their pious, Roman Catholic boss, tall, white-haired Dennis Francis Kelly, who was trusting his subordinates to keep things in order while he vacationed in California. Another shocker was the angry Ration Box and Crucifix, in which Artist Adrian Troy expressed his opinion of the state relief administration with two scatological words seldom seen in paint or print.

Asked to take away these pictures and some other nudes, the embattled independents protested indignantly, refused to compromise by hanging the pictures in a separate room. Though the store's contract for the exhibition provided that ''The Fair shall have absolute right to eliminate from [its] premises any such works of art as it may desire," the artists believed that the cherished no-jury principle had been violated, apparently not by the contract, but by the fact that the contract had been invoked. Sadly The Fair's Advertising Manager Arthur D. Buckland, himself an artist, withdrew his picture from the show, stated that his Executive Committee was no jury, but "a department store is a public institution and . . . cannot take part in political controversies; it cannot open to the young and adolescent of the city anything which, in their youth and inexperience, they might woefully misinterpret."

On Lake Shore Drive, Chicago youths, adolescents and gallery-goers found that Modern Olympia had been given the show's most prominent position, at the top of the stairs leading to the second floor. Ration Box and Crucifix could be seen on the third floor, leaning against a radiator.

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