East, West, South

¶ Painting in a high key means using bright colors without much tonal shading or contrast with neutral greys and browns. A brave method, what it may produce for the uninspired was shown in astonishing variety last week in Manhattan at the 113th annual exhibition of the National Academy. By contrast with four out of five of the 300-odd paintings, the American Abstract Art which preceded them at the spacious Fine Arts Building (TIME, Feb. 28) seemed modestly professional. Exceptions were the entries of a dozen academicians who know their business and a few young artists whom the Academy has lately delighted to honor. Associate Academician-Elect Frank Mechau Jr. won one of the Altman Prizes for his Last of the Wild Horses--a scene of wintry, grey-blue mountains with a train at rest in a long streamline, the locomotive sending up its ribbon of smoke, and herds of spirited horses running in well-designed cattle pens. Other prizewinners included: Gleb Derujinsky, Lewis Iselin, Jerome Myers, Charles S. Chapman, Jon Carbino, Abram Poole and President Jonas Lie.

¶ At Chicago's Art Institute the 42nd annual exhibition by artists who live within 100 miles of Chicago brought out a large entry of artists who well know that during the past five years Institute shows have sold 424 paintings, 3,546 prints and drawings, and 20 pieces of sculpture. A painter who never won a prize before--pipe-smoking, easygoing Norman MacLeish, brother of Poet Archibald MacLeish--won the Logan medal and $500, generally considered the Institute's first prize, for his Watertown, a composition of waterfront buildings worked out in warm reds and neutral colors. Artist MacLeish began painting when he was studying architecture in Paris in 1920, in the last few years has given up architecture entirely. He lives in Winnetka but does his painting in a basement studio in his mother's old mansion in Glencoe. Reason: his three children are getting to the age where they ask ''What are you doing that for, Daddy?"

¶ Big news in Richmond, Va., and auspicious news for the blossoming South, was the first Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Planned to take place on alternate years with the great Corcoran Biennial Exhibition in Washington, D. C., it displayed a much smaller but notable group of 183 paintings by 183 artists from 24 States. They were selected, from 1,551 submissions, by the bluest of blue-ribbon juries: Artists Edward Hopper, John Carroll, Bernard Kartiol, Daniel Garber, Charles Hopkinson. Honored by the award of John Barton Payne medals and purchased by the Payne Fund were Eugene Speicher's Peach Jacket, a girl portrait done in soft peach, dull green and dreamy neutrals; Henry Lee McFee's intricate, expert still life, The Desert Plant.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.