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CHICAGO DAILY NEWS

[[image]] Front and back of a coin with markings [[\image]] 

AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER FOUNDED JANUARY 1, 1878
MARSHALL FIELD JR., PRESIDENT AND PUBLISHER
BASIL L. WALTERS, EDITOR
ARTHUR E. HALL, GENERAL MANAGER
EVERETT NORLANDER, MANAGING EDITOR

Pulitzer gold medals for "most disinterested and meritorious public service" in 1956 and 1949. 

The award for 1956 was the 10th Pulitzer Prize received by the Daily News or members of its staff since 1925.

EDITORIAL PAGE STAFF: A.T. BURCH, ASSOCIATE EDITOR
John M. Johnston  
Fred J. Pannwitt  
Van Allen Bradley  
Cecil Jensen 
Sydney J. Harris

22               
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1959

WE RESPECTFULLY ASK:
Will the Judges Please Tell Why the Art Winner Won?

WITH THE greatest respect, we beg the judges of the current art show at the Art Institute to explain something to us. The show is the annual American Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture.
  
We should like to know why the judges gave the grand prize to the sculpture pictured here.
  
Now we don't by any means wish to insist, or even to suggest, that a work of art must "look like something" -- that is, look like something else. 
  
All of us are familiar with at least some kinds of abstractions that we consider beautiful. Great architecture does not "represent" anything but itself. But its lines and forms can move us deeply.

[[image - photograph of a sculpture]] 
"THE SELF" 
By Noguchi

We get similar effects from skillful interior decoration. We can get it from the designs of a piece of wallpaper, resembling nothing else; from a length of cloth, or the covering of a floor.

Thus the least sophisticated of us knows from experience that art and design do not have to represent other real objects to be suggestive of meaning, to be "beautiful", to affect our feelings.

What we should like to have the judges tell us is what the prize-winning sculpture meant to them.

The prize-winning sculpture is called "The Self." Perhaps the artist didn't expect us to try to fit the title to his creation, but most beholders will do so.

Well -- the Self appears to be a closed circuit, and maybe the Self, in a large sense is. There are crevices in it through which light penetrates - and perhaps that is significant.

There are symmetrical bulges on it - but we can't immediately figure out what kind of bulges. Aspiration that doesn't quite break out into achievement? Or is it merely the congestion of indigestion - a blockage, an enlarged thyroid, a cancer that swells this Self?

To write this is to confess our own obtuseness. But we are willing to learn. Please, judges, tell us what it meant to you. Then we should like to hear the artist tell what it means to him. We wonder if there would be any correspondence.

The difficulty with so much current abstract art is simply that the idiom is not comprehensible to very many people. We doubt, therefore, whether this period will ever be recalled as a great one in the history of art.

Historians of art are in fair agreement on what are its great moments. It strikes us that in all of these periods the purpose of painting and sculpture was readily comprehensible to most of the people. So were decoration and architecture.

THERE WERE ALWAYS, to be sure, pioneers and innovators not immediately accepted as they came to be later. But in its great days art was definitely a medium of communication between the artist and the people.
  
Well, if there is any communication from this prize-winning sculpture we'd like to be let in on it. We're willing to have our lives enriched, and we'd like to share the enrichment with our readers.