Worcester's Opening

Few people would think of making pilgrimage to Worcester, Mass. A grimy New England manufacturing town, it has a great many traffic lights, quick-lunchrooms and overhead trolley wires. Yet shepherded by none less than the newly created Joseph, Baron Duveen of Millbank, 150 critics, painters, art dealers, collectors, reporters, pressagents and others piled into a special train at New York's Grand Central Station last week bound for Worcester.

The occasion was the opening of the new $700,000 building of the Worcester Art Museum, designed by William T. Aldrich of Boston. Its exterior is in the familiar Institutional Renaissance, but the interior, adapted largely from the new Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, is one of the most efficient museum buildings in the country. As in the Fogg, galleries stem from a central Palladian arcaded courtyard.

Present director of Worcester's Museum is amiable, oval Francis Henry ("Fran") Taylor, Philadelphia socialite, whose archeological apprenticeship was spent as a student in France and as curator in the Pennsylvania Museum of Art. When he went to Worcester two years ago plans for a new building had already been made. More to the point, the money was already in hand, a legacy from Stephen Salisbury III. Director Taylor concentrated on building up his museum's collection. On view last week were a portrait of Diane de Poitiers by 16th Century null Clouet; a fine El Greco; a pair of portraits by Britain's great William Hogarth; a gallery of U. S. primitive art from Worcester County; another containing excellent examples of George Inness, Winslow Homer, Albert Ryder, Ralph Blakelock. Specially borrowed for the opening was Josef Stransky's collection of modern French art--notably strong in Blue and Pink Period Picassos. And spread through the galleries of the old Museum was Director Taylor's prize catch: first showing of some 300 canvases assembled by the College Art Association from nearly 20 different countries, a potent rival of the Carnegie Institute's famed international shows.

While Worcester, famed among musicians as the home of the oldest music festival in the U. S., opened a new art museum last week, the Toledo Museum of Art turned the tables by opening a 1,500-seat concert hall in one of its new wings, gift of the late Ohio bottle maker Edward Drummond Libbey. That too was an occasion. Curly-haired Leopold Stokowski and his Philadelphia Symphony traveled out for the opening concert. Grandiloquently entitled The Peristyle, the new concert hall is built like a Greek outdoor theatre with sharply sloping banks of seats around the arena and a pillared colonnade at the back. Borrowing an idea from the newer cinemansions the flat-domed ceiling is artificially illuminated to look like a night sky. The lobby is known as the pronaos. The kopron is simply marked "Men."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.