Muskegon's Tornado

Provincial museums can never hope to compete in the world's art marts for the sort of paintings that Mellons & Morgans like. But they can play another and more exciting game by buying modern pictures which some day may rise to the rank and worth of Old Masters.

Such a picture is John Steuart Curry's famed Tornado (TIME, Dec. 24 et ante). Showing a frightened Kansas family with children and farm pets rushing for a cyclone cellar, it won the $1,000 second prize at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of 1933, was featured at the Chicago Century of Progress, has been widely reproduced. Last week Artist Curry's agents, the Ferargil Galleries, sold it to the Hackley Art Gallery of Muskegon, Mich.

Opened in 1912, Muskegon's art gallery was named in honor of that Medici of Muskegon, the late Charles Henry Hackley who left $150,000 in 1905 for it. A lumber tycoon who at one time used to strip 30,000,000 feet of timber a year from Michigan woods, he dearly loved Muskegon, also gave the town a public library, an endowment fund, a manual training school, a hospital, a public park dotted with statuary. The Hackley Gallery has only recently begun to develop. Besides the Curry Tornado, it owns a Whistler, a Hogarth, a Blakelock, many good prints.

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