Nuggets

Prospectors among the eucalyptus and olive groves of San Francisco's flowering little World's Fair last week struck gold at three points. All three were ambitious installation jobs; none had been completed for the opening, fortnight ago.

Renaissance. Safe from fire or quake in one of the fairground's two permanent hangar buildings was the biggest, choicest exhibition of art ever shown in California. To select its gallery of contemporary paintings and sculpture, meditative Roland McKinney, onetime director of the Baltimore Museum, had traveled 30,000 miles and peered carefully at the handiwork of 350 U. S. artists. To assemble a central gallery of decorative arts, smart San Franciscan Dorothy Liebes whizzed through Europe last summer visiting ateliers from dawn to dusk, enlisted such distinguished U. S. and European designers as Richard Neutra, Mies van der Rohe. A glowing fulfillment of the fair's "Pacific" theme were seven rooms of treasured art and craftsmanship hand-picked by Harvard's expert, twitchy-browed Orientalist Langdon Warner--from China, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Northwest America, South America, Central America.

But the exhibition that San Franciscans crowed over most--and with good reason --was the Old Masters show. California is far from overstocked with masterpieces of the great artistic periods, and California artists are the first to admit the lack of traditional guidelines which that entails. Accordingly, it was good news for them as well as for everybody else that the Fair had acquired about $30,000,000 worth of first-rank masterpieces, not from Eastern U. S. collections but from Europe. Greatest was the Italian Renaissance group, including such almost mythical beauties as Botticelli's Birth of Venus from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Mantegna's St. George from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice.

Lucky wangler of this terrific haul was Ski-enthusiast Walter Heil, Director of the de Young Memorial Museum and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (an art gallery full of Rodins in Lincoln Park). Rumor in San Francisco was that the Fascist Government authorized the loan to San Francisco rather than New York City because Mussolini was in a pet about New York's Mayor LaGuardia. More likely story: having spent her full fair quota on a pavilion at the New York Fair, Italy had nothing but art to send to San Francisco.

Maps. One of the artistic hits of the Paris Exposition of 1937 was a large map of Austria painted on the walls of the Austrian pavilion. The nation is gone but the notion came into its own at San Francisco in Pacific House. A clean, well-lighted place, surrounded by the pavilions and temples of India, Siam, Burma, Indo-China, Japan and the Americas, Pacific House has map-murals as its principal decoration. Its urbane idea-man was Philip Newell Youtz, recent director and modernizer of the Brooklyn Museum. His best idea: four large (15-by-24-feet) mural maps of the Pacific side of the world, by Mexico's Miguel Covarrubias.

The freshness and beauty of these maps, painted in fresco-like colors with a new acetate binder, was equalled by their value as visual educators. Researchers at Coast universities helped dig up the material which Artist Covarrubias translated into symbolic figures illustrating the Pacific's peoples, economy, art forms, flora & fauna. Prettiest map: Flora & Fauna, in which gay Artist Covarrubias hung his Brazilian sloth from the bar of the Equator (see cut).

Indian Nations. For prejudice-breaking value and charm nothing in the Fair surpassed an exhibition of American Indian art, housed in one wing of the handsome Federal building. To two kinds of visitors it gave pause and enlightenment: 1) those who think that "civilization" came to North America with the white man; 2) those who think that pre-white civilization is now cheapened or extinct. The man who made both views appear distinctly stuffy was Rene d'Harnoncourt, Austrian-born artist, teacher and brightest young blood in the Interior Department's Office of Indian Affairs.

"One thing people must learn," said he, "is not to refer to these people as just Indians. It doesn't make sense. Nowhere in Europe can you find as much difference between nations. ..." Lanky, ebullient Director d'Harnoncourt showed the difference in seven cunningly designed rooms: fine basketry and feather-weaving by the Pomos and Paiutes of California and Nevada; weaving and silver work by the Hopis, Navahos, Apaches of the Southwest; bone and tusk carving by the Chinook and other fishermen of the Northwest; magnificent work with buffalo and elk skins by the Sioux, Blackfoot and Crow tribes of the plains; beautifully carved wooden ware of the Eastern Iroquois.

Gifted young Indian artists helped arrange the show, painted murals of buffalo hunters, and tribal dances (see cut). In the open court, Navaho rug weavers set up their loom, to be followed by other craftsmen, including a Cherokee with an eight-foot blowpipe who can hit a bull's-eye at 100 paces. Over half the work shown was contemporary. That it was a far cry from the usual stuff sold to tourists was due in many cases to its ritual character, and also to the fact that Indians, sensibly, sell only junk at junk prices.

-Not merely "The Islands," as Californians call the Hawaiians, but the southerly archipelagoes--Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia.

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