N.A.W.A.'s 52nd

Last week in Manhattan an art organization founded by rebels held one of the most conservative shows of the season. The occasion: the 52nd annual exhibition of the National Association of Women Artists. On view in spacious 57th Street galleries were art forms ranging from garden sculpture to decorative embroidery, woodcut print to oil painting. Most popular subjects: flowers, children, landscape views, sculptured nudes.

In 1889, when N.A.W.A. was founded, it was next to impossible for a woman artist to get her work professionally exhibited. Last week most of the 288 exhibitors no longer needed the props of cooperative feminism which drew their predecessors together. They showed their work with calm professionalism, asked prices from $3.50 (for a lithograph) to $2,000 (for a wood carving).

Association members attended an amiable, buzzing, first-night reception, divided $1,035 prize money among eleven of their number. Among the guests of honor were white-haired Art Patron Anne Morgan, Novelist Fannie Hurst. Top prize: $200 went to 50-year-old Dorothy Eaton of Petersham, Mass, for her large genre painting Country Auction. Another prize: $100 to 33-year-old Manhattanite Anne Eisner for Autumn Landscape, an earthy, heavily painted view of fields and houses.

N.A.W.A.'s 52nd exhibition proved once again that, whatever the flaming hopes of its founders, most U.S. women artists today are limited to the competent, the academic, the derivative, the studious.

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