Jumping on the Jury

The Corcoran Gallery in Washington staged its 21st biennial exhibition last week. Designed to be a cross section of contemporary U.S. art, the show should have been as exciting an event as most of the Corcoran's past shows. Actually, it was no such thing.

Of the pictures on exhibition, 174 had been invited by the Corcoran jury. They included more or less competent work by most of the noted U.S. painters. But there was nothing surprising in the lot. The other 13 pictures in the show--culled from 2,000 entries in open competition--were no better and no worse than the invited ones. The New York World-Telegram's Emily Genauer, one of the few U.S. art critics with a nose for news, set out to discover how the jury had operated.

The jury was composed of Corcoran Director Hermann Warner Williams Jr. and three painters: abstractionist Abraham Rattner, landscape and genre painter Paul Sample, and Pepsi-Cola Prizewinner Mitchell Jamieson (TIME, Oct. 4). Together they had spent a day in Manhattan and another in Washington, rejected close to 1,000 pictures (including some by top-notch artists) at each stop. What, Miss Genauer wanted to know, had been their basis of judgment?

Well, said Painter Sample, it was "both a consideration of the painter's intentions and his realization of these intentions." Abraham Rattner enlarged on Sample's statement by saying that a work that was exceedingly well painted might very well be omitted if the jury felt that it was not genuinely eloquent or expressive, or if the technique chosen did not appear to have been honestly felt or arrived at by the artist.

Leaving aside the critical fallacy involved in judging an artist's work by guessing at his "intentions," Miss Genauer came down with both high heels on Rattner's rationalization. "It is easy," she wrote, "to spot technical proficiency quickly, but to decide on the honesty of an artist's approach on the basis of only one of his works, and that examined at an average speed of two or three pictures a minute, takes considerable doing."

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