Alarm in Washington

In Washington, D.C., a group of Churchill's fellow amateurs found the sunlit garden of painting full of unexpected thorns.

A three-man professional jury, asked to judge the Corcoran Gallery of Art's annual show of local artists, decided to apply strict professional standards to what is largely an amateur event. They found only 18 paintings worth hanging on the wall. That left more than 1,000 entries (painters of every school, from mock-Picassos to mock-realists) out in the cold. To comfort the rejected artists, the Corcoran hung their pictures in another part of the gallery.

A statement printed in the official bulletin put the jury's case: "Thousands of people in the U.S. are painting. Only a few of them are artists . . . The overbalance of the mediocre ... is becoming so alarming and is so detrimental to art and artists in their relation to the public, that the jury feels its duty is to throw its weight on the side of honesty and knowledge."

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