The Omaha Guide

DEWEY IMPRESSES AS MAN AND OFFICIAL

CONTROVERSY STARTS AS WOMAN'S PAINTING WINS FIRST PRIZE AT MISSOURI FAIR

Sedalia, Mo., Sept. 1 (ANP)- Missouri's biggest controversy in art circles since Thomas Hart Benton painted his murals for the state capitol got under way last week when Mrs. Percy Lewis of Marshall, Mo., won first prize in the state fair contest over the state's most carefully trained white artists.

Her winning picture was "Farm Life," a barnyard scene painted on muslin three and a half feet by four and half because she had no canvas. She used oils in the main, but where she wanted to picture windmill blade or other aluminum shellac.

Artists who lost to Mrs. Lewis, wife of a veterinarian, complained that her work was "primitive art." The winner has never taken a painting lesson.

"That's right," agreed Austin Faricy, professor esthetics at Stephens College for Women, at Columbia. Mo., and judge of the contest. "It is the finest piece of primitive art I have ever seen. And if any riots start over this award, you know where to find me."

As soon as visitors were admitted to the gallery, the row began in earnest. Crowds gathered in front of the picture, heatedly arguing both for and against. The museum, as a result did the best business of the fair.

Mrs. Lewis lives in a battered farm house near Marshall, Mo. She says she has been painting since she was six and won a Chicago World's fair award for a handpainted pillow.

More than 100 entered the state fair contest. A reclining nude, offered by Robert Graham, white of Kansas City, was hailed by critics and visitors as a throbbing sensation, but "not sensational enough."

Mrs. Lewis used aluminum shellac for the painting of such subordinate details as windmill blades, a plow, a pitch fork and other instruments of her "Farm Life," which made a striking contrast against the figures in oil, including animals, all approximately of the same size.

A log cabin centered the painting. Scattered around it were a surrey drawn by a dappled horse, bearing a Negro couple garbed in brilliant colors; a cow, manure pile, pitchfork, chickens, sheep, stacked wheat, a grain field; a hunter and a dog, water lillies, cattals, and a boy and a girl, drinking from a well. Cats and dog are the same size. Observers agreed that it portrayed life on the farm as it is actually lived.

But because of the unusual perspective, spectators agreed that Mrs. Lewis must have placed her easel upon the windmill, looked down and painted everything in view.