Bid: $2,000; Asked: $125

John Steuart Curry, Thomas Benton, John Sloan, Reginald Marsh, Alexander Brook and many another headliner of U. S. art last week exhibited canvases in the biennial show of Washington's Corcoran Gallery--for the biggest cash prizes ($5,000 worth) any U. S. artist can hope to win. But the first prize ($2,000) went to a comparatively unknown painter named John Edward Heliker, 31. Painter Heliker's only art training had been a few months discursive study at the Art Students League in Manhattan. He had lived most of his life on his father's farm near Poughkeepsie, N. Y.

In 1936 he gave a watercolor and drawing show in Manhattan, sold a few pictures (top: $15). Painter Heliker's $2,000 prize canvas, a hardbitten, blocky Vermont landscape, had been put on sale in Manhattan last autumn at $125, but nobody had wanted it.

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