For the last two weeks the Boston Common was the site of the sixth annual Boston Arts Festival. Its success is attested by the three-quarters of a million people who flocked to its exhibits and ancillary cultural events. Included this year were competitive exhibits in architecture, painting, sculpture, drawing and graphic arts, plus several special invitational shows--a retrospective survey of the past hundred years of New England architecture, a national show of American painting and sculpture, and displays of Mexican and New England craftsmen in such fields as ceramics, jewelry, wood-turning and weaving (with periodic live demonstrations).

The Festival committee adopted a better system of selecting the many entries than has obtained in the past: each of the ten jurors was allowed up to 10 unchallenged individual choices, and the rest were then picked by majority vote. The prizes were awarded by a separate jury consisting of Harris K. Prior, Director of the American Federation of Arts, New York; Perry T. Rathbone '33, Director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; and Edgar P. Richarson, Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

The national invitational exhibition contained 53 paintings and 15 pieces of sculpture. Of the paintings only a handful--such as Corrado Marca-Relli's "The Seeker" and Adja Yunkers' "Composition II"--were unworthy choices. Jack Levine's "The Judge" (see cut at right) won the Grand Prize It is indeed a masterly work, executed in splotches of restrained browns and dull white that take shape only at a distance. Other exceptional works were George Grosz's "Night-mare," Mitchell Siporin's "The Gallery," and Max Weber's "Flute Player." William Kienbush received honorable mention for his competent "Coast of Baker Island." The sculpture choices, however, were poor on the whole; Isamu Noguchi's "The Ring" was by far the best item.

New England Competition

The New England competition comprised 172 paintings and drawings, and 34 examples of sculpture. The quality of the first category was high, with only four or five pieces of utter trash. The first prize in painting went for some reason to Fannie Hillsmith's "Pink Sofa," with other awards to Justin Curry, Glen Krause, Beverly Hallam, Henrik Mayer, John McClusky and Teal McKibben.

I most liked Lawrence Kupferman's "Force That Drives the Water Through the Rocks," Boris Margo's "Evening" (see cut at lower left), Shan-Ching Toong's economical "Lobsters," and Paul Zimmerman's "November Moon." Alsc good were the works by Ruth Cobb, Esther Geller, Walter Meigs, Conger Metcalf, Arthur Polonsky and Sol Wilson.

First prize in graphic arts rightly went to Leonard Baskin for his superb "Shofar Prayer." Other awards went to William Georgenes, Jane Stouffer and Donald Kelley, the last outstanding for his "Priscilla." In sculpture, first prize went to Harold Tovish's good "Head of a Girl," with honorable mention to William Martin's striking "Stalking Bird." I liked George Aaron's "Jeremiah" and Peter Abate's "Youth and His Dreams" most of all.

Donald Stoltenberg received the overall Grand Prize for his painting "Times Square No. 2." This is a large work in which the patches of light jump out at the beholder with almost blinding force. Strangely, the painting improves if looked at from an oblique angle.

In the architecture competition, 14 New England structures were chosen from a field of sixty. The judges hit the nail on the head by making the Award to Anderson, Beckwith & Haible (Boston) for the magnificent Office Building for Boston Manufacturers Mutual Insurance Company in Waltham, Mass.; and by singing out for commendation the Brandeis University Interfaith Center in Waltham, and the Tokeneke Elementary School in Darien, Conn.

"A Century of New England Architecture" was a special exhibition presented in cooperation with the American Institute of Architects on the occasion of their 100th anniversary. Arranged by Norman Fletcher, it included 32 large panels of photographs and descriptive commentaries of representative milestones (some no longer extant) in New England architecture, including Harvard's Sever Hall (by H.H. Richardson), Lowell House (by Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch & Abbott), and a proposed new city plan for Spring-field, Mass. by students in the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Much of the excellent photography in the exhibit was done by the renowned Samuel Chamberlain (which reminds me that it might be a good idea to include a photography competition in next year's Arts Festival).

'The Consul'

First of the series of evening stage presentations was Gian-Carlo Menotti's opera "The Consul," given four times. Menotti's best work, though musically uneven, it ranks with Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" and Copland's "The Tender Land" as one of the three finest operas to come out of this country. "The Consul" demonstrates an unerring sense of theatre in its almost unrelievedly anguished tale of Magda Sorel's attempt to get out of a bureaucratic country crawling with secret police, and its tragic results--a timely story in view of recent events in Hungary.

The role of Magda was played by Patricia Neway, who won awards for it six years ago in New York. She is a superb actress as well as a consummate singer, and I found her performance here even more exalted than on Broadway. All the other singers were fine, notably Norman Adkins, Ruth Kobart, Lydia Summers and Leon Lishner. Chandler Cowles' staging was first-rate; and Evan Whallon's handling of the orchestra was expert, except for letting the piano play too loudly.

I hope the Festival Committee will not heed the critic of the Globe, who complained that a light and gay opera ought to have been picked for warm weather. I am sick of the idiotic policy of calling a moratorium on serious plays and operas of high quality during the summer months. The audiences certainly appreciate the chance of seeing this fine work, heat or no.

New England Composers