A Strip Tease Pays Off

One of the nation's fattest cash prizes for art was copped last week by a grossly satirical picture of unbuttoned sensuality. For Strip Tease in New Jersey, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. handed over its $2,000 W. A. Clark First Prize Award to blond, balding Reginald Marsh, 46.

A Yale-trained (class of 1920) son of an artist, "Reggie" Marsh studied painting at Manhattan's Art Students League, made his reputation in the late '20s with Hogarthian studies of city low life ("Well-bred people are no fun to paint"). His Strip Tease was easily, by the width of a broad bottom, the raciest picture the staid Corcoran had ever thus honored. It showed a slightly idealized, if muscular, ecdysiast in mid-routine. The variously brooding faces of seven balding burlesque-addicts include the artist's own, in foreground (see cut). Artist Marsh found the inspiration for Strip Tease in a Union City, N.J. burlesque house, painted the picture on gesso panel in a soft-toned mixture of egg yolk and dry color.

The award was the forerunner of the Corcoran's 19th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings, which opens next fortnight with a show of 219 invited works. The Corcoran Biennial carries four sizable awards. This year's Second Prize, $1,500, went to Malvin Marr Albright who signs his work "Zsissly," to keep from being confused with his twin brother, famed Chicago Painter Ivan Le Lorraine Albright. Marsh's first-prizewinner raised an occasional eyebrow, lowbrow and highbrow; they lowered to normal at Zsissly-Albright's Deer Isle, Maine, a faithful-to-nature landscape.

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