In Brooklyn

Brooklyn is the biggest and homeliest (in every sense of the word) borough of New York City (population circa 2,300,000). It has just begun to erect skyscrapers, is jeered at by many Manhattanites who used to live there, has been variously entitled the bedroom of New York City, a group of small towns, "the city of churches," and New York's "rive gauche" (left bank). But Brooklyn has an esthetic tradition all its own. There lived Poet Walt Whitman, Critic James Gibbons Huneker, Artist Joseph Pennell. There in the picturesque "Brooklyn Heights" section overlooking New York Harbor, live many refugees from Manhattan's "arty" and despoiled Greenwich Village, including one of the most touted figures in contemporary painting-- Yasuo Kuniyoshi (TIME, April 7). And Brooklyn has an art museum which is by no means en echo of Manhattan's giant Metropolitan, but an important, lively institution in its own right. Last week several heroic pieces of statuary were set up on the tecrace before this immense Roman pile, designed by McKim, Mead & White. Heralds were they of a great exhibition of sculpture by U. S. citizens and foreigners working in the U. S. which was opened in, and served to inaugurate, the museum's vast sculpture court. Few displays in the U. S. have compared-with it in scope and quality-- some 546 pieces were shown by such famed artisans as Robert Aitken, Alexander Archipenko, Alexander Stirling Calder, Allan Clark., Hunt Diederich, Charles Grafly, Malvina Hoffman, Gaston Lachaise, Aristide Maillol, Paul Manship. Edward McCartan, Robert Tait McKenzie, Charles Gary Rumsey, Mahonri Young, William Zorach. Those who inspected them were in full accord with Borough President Henry Hesterberg of Brooklyn, who in his opening address made the forthright comment: "This to my mind is a very great proposition." But fine, frequent and varied as are its temporary exhibits, it is Brooklyn Museum's permanent collections which sustain its reputation. Among these: the Avery collection of Chinese cloissonne; a collection of Xapoleana unsurpassed in the U. S., donated by the late Dean Marion Reilly of Bryn Mawr College: the American rooms, 22 excellent native interiors faithfully rebuilt in the museum; a modern watercolor collection scarcely to be equalled anywhere (much notable work by Sargent, Homer, Burchfield, Hawthorne, Davies, Demuth. etc., etc.); a collection exhibiting the history of costume in the U. S.; the 461 famed water-colors of the Life of Christ by the late James Joseph Jacques Tissot. Friendly, white-haired William Henry Fox, director since 1913, has wisely chosen to supplement rather than ape the Metropolitan Museum. He admits no exhibitions, for instance, which have previously been shown in Manhattan. He provides that Brooklyn Museum shall pay close attention to modernity, not a Metropolitan specialty.

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