SUMMER PRIZEWINNERS

As the summer season closed, museums and communities began dismantling the huge group shows, designed to satisfy tourists and help artists, that have become customary across the land. In size, the shows had often been barbaric. Visitors strolled through the exhibitions as if in a forest, ignoring the fact that any painting or sculpture worth seeing at all requires long contemplation.

The summer shows pointed up the fact that abstraction reigns supreme in the hearts of the nation's young artists. To make a great abstraction is difficult-perhaps even impossible. But passably assured and decorative examples are fairly easy to produce, and juries-under the spell of trend and times-tend to award them their prizes. The jury at Chicago's Art Institute gave Richard Talaber, 26, the top prize for just such a picture. At Boston's elaborate summer Arts Festival, the Grand Prize went to a sculptor, Gilbert Franklin, for his safely modern Beach Figure, clean-lined and anonymous as a newel post. But the public has yet to acquire the jurist's inhibitions. Critics see form first in a work of art; the average layman sees content. At Boston's Festival, viewers voted overwhelmingly for Gardner Cox's Robert Frost. Cox's portrait might be a bit fuzzy, but the subject had nobility, and that proved enough.

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