Sedate & Sweet

Two hundred ninety-six paintings and statues by such famed artists as Gifford Beal. James Chapin, Guy Pene du Bois, William J. Glackens, Eugene Higgins, Leon Kroll, Jonas Lie, Eugene Speicher, John Sloan were on view when the great Chicago Art Institute opened its 47th annual show last week. Many of the artists were there in person as were most of Chicago's socialites and connoisseurs, of whom the most important by far was a dumpy, indomitable lady swathed in pearls, orchids and caracul coat. Wife of the unassuming Honorary President of the Institute, Mrs. Frank G. Logan puts up the money for the $500 Logan prize-one of the two highest awards of the show. It is also Mrs. Logan, resolute opponent of modern art, who has complained most vociferously at the juries' bestowal of her prize in recent years (TIME. Nov. 18). Mrs. Logan, never averse to publicity, has organized a group for "Sanity in Art" and set to work on a book of the same title expounding her ideas.

Last week's Chicago Art Institute show carefully avoided any of the extreme schools of U. S. painting, was described by Chicago's ablest critic, Clarence Joseph Bulliet (Chicago Daily News), as "a sedate show of practically unrelieved conservatism." The jury for painting-Edmund Archer, John Steuart Curry, Jerry Farnsworth, Meyric Rogers, Thomas Tallmadge-salved its artistic conscience by giving Mrs. Logan's prize to an unexceptionable if uninspired studio nude entitled Olympia, by capable, hard-working Robert Philipp of Manhattan.

Late in the afternoon day before the show opened, Mrs. Logan, accompanied by Chicago Tribune Critic Eleanor Jewett, arrived at the museum. Director Robert B. Harshe rushed forward hastily, conducted his patron to the prizewinning Olympia.

"Do you approve, Mrs. Logan? Do you approve?'' he cried anxiously.

"Yes," said Mrs. Logan, "I approve. It is very sweet."

Sweeping through the rest of the gallery, Mrs. Logan looked with marked disfavor on another prizewinner, Earthquake by Jon Corbino, showing a sleeping family on the second floor of a collapsing barn above a group of frightened horses.

"And why, Mr. Harshe," asked she, "should a thing like that be given a prize?" Hanging next to the prizewinning earthquake was a picture by Jim Lee of two amiable Japanese moppets reading a book. As a rebuke. Mrs. Logan bought it.

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