Vote-Getter

The nation's most popular native painter is still Frederick Judd Waugh (rhymes with pshaw). His turbulent surfscapes won the Carnegie International's popularity prize five years in a row (1934-38), and since his death in 1940 they have gone right on pleasing the public. For the past five years his March--North Atlantic has been touring the country in the Encyclopaedia Britannica's traveling collection of U.S. art. In 26 cities, Britannica announced last week, the public had voted Waugh's picture the best of the 124 in the collection.

Waugh, who lived by the sea in Provincetown, Mass., painted about 75 surf-scapes a year, sold almost all of them at fat prices. For variety's sake he kept-shifting the rocks in his pictures: sometimes they occupied the left-hand side of the canvas, sometimes the right, and now & again the center. Moderns who sniffed at his sticking to a proven formula overlooked the fact that such abstractionists as Mondrian did the same thing.

In his spare time Waugh made souvenir boxes of sea shells, a whalebone chandelier, a papier-mache castle for his children--and abstract paintings. He never exhibited the abstractions, for fear of shocking his devoted customers.

He was partial to surrealism as well as abstraction, and disarmingly modest about his own academic works. "None of my pictures has ever completely satisfied me," he once remarked; "I hope that some day I can paint one picture of which I can say, 'This is the sea.'"

Some critics maintain he never made it. They consider that Waugh's green seas and white breakers lack the seasick lift and crash of the real thing, that his notion of daylight was a drab one, and that his wet brown rocks might as well have been chocolate ice cream. The public disagrees.

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