"Chicago Is Not That Sick"

Biggest, brawlingest and richest ($7,975 in prizes) local art annual in the U.S. is held by Chicago's Art Institute. Last week, as usual, Chicago's 59th annual blew up in a storm of local outrage. Reason: of the 24 cash awards (picked from 2,027 works submitted), 18 went to relative unknowns, e.g., the top painting award ($1,500) was won by Canadian-born Anna P. Baker, 27 and two years out of art school, for a hectic, minutely squiggled abstractionist canvas titled High Frequency Ping. Almost every big-name Chicago artist finished out of the prize money.

"The show does not reflect Chicago in the slightest," snapped the Tribune's

Critic Eleanor Jewett. "The influence of Marca-Relli, Baziotes, De Kooning, Matta and Picasso ... is so obvious that it hurts." Pointing to this year's out-of-town jury (Manhattan's Painter Hedda Sterne and Sculptor Ibram Lassaw, Carnegie Institute's Fine Arts Director Gordon Bailey Washburn), Critic Jewett snorted, "Originality has been sacrificed in the jury's sustained effort to make this Midwest exhibition as like as possible to a New York modern show."

Chicago Daily News Critic Kenneth Shopen fumed: "Painting has given way to plastering, sewing and pasting . . . Fastened upon the canvas are such 'found objects' as cheesecloth, string, mud, sand, scraps of cardboard, fragments of mirrors, broken bottles and tennis shoes . . . Sculpture has given way to constructions where 'found objects' of junk yards are welded together in fantastic arrangements with droolings of solder . . . Work dealing with decay, destruction, fragmentation, explosions and torture are frequent. Apparently it is stylish to make a negative rather than an affirmative statement about life--and easier . . . Chicago is not that sick."

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