One-Shot Winner

Many times a Carnegie exhibitor, Leon Kroll had never won a Carnegie Prize until last week. Famed for his nudes, his bright, formalized landscapes, Artist Kroll has hung canvases at Pittsburgh's great international show for 23 years, took an Honorable Mention in 1925, was even a member of the Carnegie jury in 1929. Reckoned by quantity of output, Artist Kroll stood less chance of winning this year than at any time since 1913. So far this year he has done just one oil. Last week that proved sufficient to take his country's highest painting honor and its $1,000 reward.

Working for the Federal Government, Artist Kroll has spent the entire year on two enormous lunettes representing the Defeat and Triumph of Justice for the Attorney General's new conference room.* They are not yet finished, for Artist Kroll takes his commission seriously, has found mural painting more difficult than he expected. In July and August he went on vacation to his favorite Folly Cove, Cape Ann, Mass., where he has summered since 1930. He set up an easel in the back garden, painted the only canvas he has had time for since starting work on the Department of Justice murals. It showed a dirt road winding down between budding willows to the sea; in the foreground a half-nude workman lies on a sunny rock; one woman kneels beside him while another is climbing up from the fields below (see cut). For models Artist Kroll used a onetime ditchdigger and sculptor's assistant named Jim McClellan, Mrs. Demetrios, wife of Sculptor George Demetrios, a farmer's daughter named Olga. He named the canvas The Road From the Cove, sent it to Pittsburgh, where it was judged preeminent by an exacting jury: precise Surrealist Pierre Roy of France; British Muralist Alfred Kingsley Lawrence; ailing Edward Bruce, director of the first Federal Art Projects; convivial Guy Pene du Bois. To win over the 323 other entries from six countries, Artist Kroll's canvas had to beat:

P: A vivid genre painting of a Midwestern barber shop by Paul Sample.

P: An Essai Surrealiste by famed Salvador Dali, showing a vast dark cypress tree rising against an evening sky from which grows a half-opened book transfixed by a peg on which droops one of Artist Dali's limp watches.

P: A fine fat Venus by Italy's Giovanni Romagnoli.

P: Susan, a portrait study of a plump young blonde by Eugene Speicher.

P: Two Women, a pastel-toned oil in the familiar, delicately decadent manner of France's aging Marie Laurencin.

When the jury last week decided that Artist Kroll's picture outranked all of these, it also awarded the second prize of $600 to spectacled French Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard for a gaily colored still life of a breakfast table, the $500 third prize to a study of two stolid peasant women leaning over a table, the work of Spain's Pedro de Valencia.

As usual, professional art critics whose annual junket to Pittsburgh is a sort of esthetic American Legion Convention, turned up their noses at the choices of the prize jury. In 1934 they objected to Peter Blume's surrealist South of Scranton as the work of a decadent school of non- sense. In 1935 Spanish Hipolito Hidalgo de Caviedes' prizewinning picture of a young Negro couple on a sofa was held inferior to dozens of U. S. paintings of the same type. Of Leon Kroll's Road From the Cove Critic Henry McBride wrote in the New York Sun:

"It is an operatic picture. It shows one of those young men who work half-naked on the reconstruction projects, overcome by the midday sun and lying full-length on the turf. A nearby woman eyes him pityingly as though he were dead. . . . The young man really is dead, but it is not important."

Added Critic Edward Alden Jewell in the New York Times:

"The landscape portion is handled with real decorative adroitness, but it may be objected that the forms . . . remain static, posed, studio figures. The effect of the whole, if brilliantly contrived, is pedantic and artificial."

Artist Kroll's U. S. competition might have been keener were it not for the current squabble over whether or not museums and art galleries should pay rental for exhibitors' pictures. Because the Carnegie International declines to pay rental fees, dozens of crack U. S. artists refused to send pictures, showed last week instead at Pittsburgh's Gillespie Galleries.

*Early photographs of the incomplete Kroll mural created a mild buzz in Washington when it was discovered that the black-gowned jurist lending a helping hand to oppressed workmen was an obvious portrait of Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, onetime Republican Attorney General, good friend of Leon Kroll and one of the Court's steady liberals.

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