G.I. Giottos

Since World War II, the Army has encouraged any G.I. who felt like it to while away his leisure time with brush and pen. A year ago, the Army announced a worldwide G.I. art competition. In Washington last week, judges shuffled through 356 top entries sent in by G.I. Giottos from Germany to the South Pacific, and were "amazed at the quality."

The G.I. canvases and drawings seldom had anything to do with the barracks or battlefield, and they showed little or no interest in abstraction. Most of the artists, ranging from buck privates to a lieutenant general,* concentrated on pleasantly realistic landscapes of such things as the Swiss Alps and palm-studded Pacific islands.

The first prize for painting (a $100 defense bond and a painting kit) went to Private Paul Calle, 23, a onetime commercial artist from Manhattan, for his somber study of a little girl in a tenement doorway. Private Calle painted it "because I was confused when I first went into the service," and the painting, drawn from memories of a Lower East Side childhood, "expressed my feeling of confusion."

G.I.s will have a chance to see the winners when the Army sends the show on a nationwide tour beginning at the Pentagon in January. They should get their biggest satisfaction out of the first-prize cartoon by Pfc. Robert Miller of Philadelphia. Miller's prizewinner: a series of pumpkin-simple caricatures of the Army face, from private to general, in which the privates clearly come off best. Says Artist Miller: "It expresses kind of the way I feel about the Army."

* Who submitted a street scene which the judges passed over without comment.

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