Drips of Fame

Fame rains on the dead, drips reluctantly on the living. Last week fame dripped on eight living painters, one dead one.

George Arnold Hearn gave $150.000 to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art 26 years ago to buy paintings by living U. S. artists. Five years later he gave $100,000 more in memory of his son Arthur Hoppock Hearn. The Metropolitan tried to be liberal, but still it could not buy a painting by a living young man without feeling cheated. It continued rigidly to buy pictures as old and respectable as possible by the dead & dying. The purchase in 1928 of Eugene Speicher's Polly marked the beginning of a thawing process. This spring the Metropolitan at long last prepared for a buying spree.

The spree began with the Metropolitan's Curator of Paintings Bryson Burroughs, a painter himself in the large, pastel, decorative style of Frenchman Puvis de Chavannes. Tall, handsome, grey-templed, mustached, he is fiction's pure type of art connoisseur. He and his assistant, Harry

Wehle, set out among the art galleries to select a half-dozen U. S. painters. They must be i) not too advanced for the Board of Trustees' cautious taste, 2) advanced enough to disarm newspaper accusations of over-caution, 3) sponsored by the right art dealers. Art dealers are not supposed to bid against a museum, but they have broken the rule in the past few years. Hence the Metropolitan is not friendly toward dealers, except two classes: the dignified old dealers like Macbeth and the very young, radical galleries not likely to want the same pictures as the Metropolitan, like the Rehn, Downtown and Milch Galleries. Curator Burroughs selected two painters each from the Macbeth, Rehn, Downtown and Milch Galleries and one from Ferargil. Several good examples by each man were sent to the Museum. Next part of the spree was by the Board of Trustees' Committee on Painting, long a rampart of conservatism. Committee conservatives are Architect Cass Gilbert, Lawyers Elihu Root Jr., William Church Osborn and Sugarman Horace Havemeyer who has given the Metropolitan many a Degas, Manet, Puvis de Chavannes. Modernism might have been doomed but for Committeeman Cornelius Bliss, a recent appointee,* brother and estate executor of the late Lizzie Bliss, benefactor of the Museum of Art. Conscientious, publicity shy, Cornelius Bliss is stanch for his late sister's modern art. When Curator Burroughs presented his nine selections to the Committee, Committeemen Gilbert and Root were absent. The Committee passed nine pictures on to the Board of Trustees, who directed Curator Burroughs to buy them. Fame had come to the living, in one case too late. Artist Glenn O. Coleman whose Speakeasy, painted with bright, shallow verve, was bought, died last month. The other young men: Kansan John Steuart Curry, cheerfully indigent, who looks like a citified farmer, has been traveling with Ringling Brothers Circus. Arnold Blanch, whose wife Lucille is as good a painter as he, lives seriously in the Woodstock, N. Y. artist colony. Unmarried Francis Speight teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy. Brusque, satirical Reginald Marsh, Yaleman, is a son of Muralist Fred Dana Marsh, husband of Sculptress Betty Burroughs, son-in-law of Metropolitan Curator Burroughs. Blond Ogden Pleissner, 27, a precisionist from Brooklyn, is the Metropolitan's youngest painter. Older are: Allen Tucker, 65, who has an independent income, a neat wit, and taught for six years at the Art Students' League. Hayley Lever, 55, who is witty too, taught at the Art Students' League too. Bernard Karfiol, 46, who was born in Budapest, studied at the National Academy of Design. Landscapes are rated the safest possible investments. Excepting only Marsh's picture of Bowery bums under the elevated railroad and Coleman's speakeasy interior, all the purchases were landscapes. Observers agreed the Metropolitan's conservatism had thawed, but not much.

* Another new trustee possibly to be groomed for the Committee on Paintings is Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, whose mother, Mrs. John Davison Rockefeller Jr., is a modern art collector.

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