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Curiously Unreal. The $1,500 first prize went to German-born Max Beckmann, 65, whom Hitler denounced and hounded out of Germany as a "degenerate" painter. Beckmann's big Fisherwomen was far from being the jut-jawed old master's best or most ambitious work, but ft did show his genius for color as well as his penchant for whipping cruelty and tenderness together into sexy, curiously unreal oils. His lamplit fisherwomen did not look like the sort that go near the water. Their hot peach flesh was set off by black garters and contrasted with the cold rose, blue and gold of the gasping fish. In the background of the composition, a dour old crone hugged a rigid eel.
Beckmann, who took out his U.S. citizenship papers last year, teaches at the Brooklyn Museum Art School two mornings a week, turns up at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel almost every afternoon at 5:00 for a cup of solitary coffee amidst the potted palms. "It is there," he says, "that I make my fantasies for my work." He often puts fish in his pictures "because I like fish, both to eat and to look at. Also they are symbols." What do they symbolize? "Geist—spirit," Beckmann replies positively. "But the man who looks at my pictures must figure them out for himself."