postwar trip to Eastern Europe and mentioned house shapes that had become a more recent preoccupation. This critic also mentioned a "gentle but firm touch" evident in her work and suggested, "it may be that she lacks that touch of megalomania so necessary for the effective statement in three dimensions." Prizes Caparn received awards from the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors (later National Association of Women Artists), including its Medal of Honor for Sculpture. In a national competition called "American Sculpture, 1951" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Caparn's "Animal Form I" was awarded $2,500 as second prize. The National Sculpture Society complained that the jurors unjustly favored a modernist style over the classically realist style that it advocated. A letter from the society called the award-winning pieces "work not only of extreme modernistic and negative tendencies but mediocre left-wing work at that." The museum stood by its decisions and issued a statement defending the neutrality of its award policies. Artistic style Caparn's earliest influences came from her encounter with the sculptures of ancient Greece. As an art student she learned a realist technique from her Parisian art instructor, Édouard Navellier, and her early animal and figure pieces were correspondingly realist in style. On returning to New York she attended an exhibition of works by Brancusi that, as she later said, completely changed her approach to art. She began to develop a style that, in 1935, Howard Devree, called a "graceful, curvilinear balance." This style was not symmetrical and ornamental, but rather expressive, with the ability to create an emotional response in the viewer. Writing in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1936, Anita Brenner told readers that "charm and decorative value" could not yield first-rate works of art; to accomplish that feat required the power of emotion. "As between an academician and a Goya, equally skilled," she said, "what makes the difference is the power of emotion in the Goya." When, in response to an interviewer's question that year, Caparn called her work "expression with form," she was agreeing with this principle. In 1933, Henry McBride, writing in the New York Sun had compared the emotional effect she achieved with the response listeners feel in a musical performance. She agreed with this point as well, saying, in 1936, that she believed sculpture and music to offer analogous emotional experiences. "Modernism in sculpture," she said, "is like music in