In Chicago

Three o'clock in the afternoon, tea tables gorgeously bedight with flowers and silver--bedight but quite deserted--an orchestra crooning overhead--and a great crowd of women seizing catalogs surged ahead into the east wing of the Art Institute in Chicago to the opening of the 38th annual exhibit of American painting and sculpture. On the walls of the great chain of rooms hung 110 portrait and figure pieces, 91 landscapes, 18 marines, 16 still life paintings, and here and there on pedestals were scattered 58 pieces of sculpture--exhibits chosen from 1,200 items submitted. The women surged about. . .

On the whole the exhibit was marked by restraint, conservatism --very little cubism, very little of the "very modern" effects. Two instructors in the Art Institute covered two of the chief prizes. Albin Polasek, sculptor, took the Logan medal and $1,500 for his statue Unfettered quite a different piece of work from his statue of "A Fat Lady Hailing a Bus" butt of wits and columnists, which stands outside the museum and was made to order of a park board. Leopold Seyfert with a self portrait took another medal and $1,000. There were two posthumous Sargents, a goodly number of paintings from the artist colony at Taos, N. M. "A very good exhibit," said critics, "but nothing marvelous."