International Exhibition

Visitors to the 26th Annual International Exhibition of Paintings, now in its second week at the Pittsburgh Carnegie Institute (TIME, Oct. 24), talked to one another about an old Scotsman. John Kane, housepainter of Pittsburgh, was known to some of the townspeople whose houses he had painted; critics had never heard his name. Some of the townspeople who remembered his long, bony face, his big, brown, scaly hands, remembered also hearing that when John Kane had finished with swabbing clapboard or pillar, he would go home and paint pictures in his bedroom. The critics, who saw his "Scene from the Scottish Highlands" hung with 119 other U. S. paintings, could believe that its creator had never attended art school. They wondered whether it was an eye for a picture or a nose for a news story that had caused the committee to honor his effort. There was no easy facility of technique, no allegiance to academic methods in his picture, as stiff and formal as a photograph, of little girls skipping and hopping to a piper's tune.

Last week the townspeople and critics moved through the Institute gallery with a soft murmuring whistle that is peculiar to museums and to the carpeted anterooms of cinema theatres. Near the three prize-winning pictures--a "Still Life" by Henri Matisse, "Motherhood" by Anto Carte, Andrew Dasburg's "Poppies"--there were small, stirring ponds of faces. There were puddles of them under many other pictures: Italian Antonio Donghi's study of three enigmatic figures, called "Carnival," which received first honorable mention; "Two Figures," languid, graceful girls painted by Bernard Karfiol of Manhattan, honorable mention. Then there were the "Calla Lillies" almost sticky with pollen as they poked stiffly from a vase, which brought Max Pechstein of Germany the $500 prize offered by the Allegheny County Garden Club.

Of the paintings that won no awards, there were many beneath which continuously gathered puzzled or admiring faces. Zuloaga, Spanish historian of portraiture, had done "The Hermit," an old man whose great serious eyes were bent downward upon a melancholy vision of glory. There was the cold ruin of "Winter in Artois" by D. Y. Cameron of England. For a whole afternoon one man peered at the blurred enchantment of "Pasture," shadowy trees and pale waving hills, by Rudolph Kremlicka, a Czechoslovakian.

In the first week so many people came that sponsors of the exhibit expected this year's attendance to break the 1924 record of 133,275. The Pittsburgh press, deprived of World's Baseball Series gloatings, ballyhooed the Art Exhibition. When President Coolidge scrutinized the exhibition and the city, the Post-Gazette in an editorial titled

"The President's Visit" said: "Pittsburgh grown great, will grow greater. . . . It has the materials. It has the skill. It has the will. . . ." In another editorial it said: "Now let the Pittsburgh public show to the utmost its appreciation of this Pittsburgh Salon--this international exhibition of paintings. . . ."

Beginning Jan. 9 the pictures will be shown in Brooklyn for six weeks. After this the 280 pictures by foreign artists will be hung for a time in San Francisco.