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AN ANSWER TO O

[[note]] √ Chicago Daily News Dec. 8, 1959 [[/note]]

Judge Tells His Reasons W

The Daily News wishes to thank Mr. Frankenstein for his courtesy in answering our editorial request. He was one of three judges who awarded the grand prize to Isamu Noguchi for a piece of sculpture illustrated herewith. He is speaking only for himself and not the other judges.

THE DAILY NEWS editorial of Dec. 2, calling upon the members of the jury for the Art Institute's current American annual to explain why they gave the "grand prize" to Isamu Noguchi's "The Self," was thoughtfully written and demands a thoughtful reply.

We were asked to award eight or nine prizes. The two largest of these - the Logan prizes of $2,000 and $1,500 respectively - could be given to painting or sculpture. All the others had to be given to painting.

Therefore, if sculpture was to be recognized at all, it had to get the two largest prizes; there were no other prizes for which it was eligible.

This lopsidedness is not the fault of the Art Institute. The donors of the prizes have attached their own conditions to them. The Art Institute, obviously, must accept the prizes as they are offered, but the distribution of awards might be made more equitable if the art-minded people of Chicago would give the Art Institute some $1,000 and $500 prizes that could be awarded to sculpture. 

Please do not misunderstand, I am emphatically not saying that Noguchi would have won a smaller prize if we had one to give him.

I EXPECTED an attack on the award to Noguchi, but in precisely opposite terms from those employed in your editorial. I thought it would stir indignation among the younger sculptors as being too conservative.

Noguchi is, after all, a strictly traditional artist; he uses materials and techniques of carving and modeling on which sculptors have relied since prehistoric times, and has no interest at all in the brazing, blowtorching, and soldering together of discarded machine parts which fascinate the current avant-garde.

He is one of the most
fect traditional craftsm
among contemporary sc
tors, but because of his la
experience and widespr
travel, there is a certain ec
tic quality about is work;
of his entries in the curr
Art Institute show–a
tablelike piece in black st
–reminds one much of a
cometti, and others are re
niscent of his teacher, Br
cusi.


BUT WHEN I studied "
Self" I felt that the special
of Isamu Noguchi was
convincingly expressed in
and that, as your edito
writer also perceived, so
thing of the special sel
each person as revealed
depth psychology was
gested in its corelike, caps
like, stringently bound
constricted form.

Transcription Notes:
I am not sure how text cut off form the scan should be transcribed, but all else on the page is correct!