Shoot in Boston

With the instinct of a patrician grandmother, Boston has taken to its bosom all that is dated and fine and foreign in the way of art. The Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University is the liveliest school of art history in the U. S.; the Fine Arts Museum is eminent for its scholarly array of Oriental and other treasures; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is probably the choicest large-scale clutter among U. S. private-made-public collections. From these institutions, however, few people would get the idea that there are artists alive and sweating now.

Except for the limited life of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, a brilliant nook run by high-brow Harvardians from 1928 to 1932, the first general awakening began four years ago. A drifting spore from Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art took root in Boston as an "affiliate," was watered by about 50 members, made $1,500 on a Modern Arts Ball (now annual and famous as the only dance at which Boston society stays up until dawn). By 1937 there were 300 members. Two months ago, with 800 paying members, Boston's offshoot became a lusty shoot, dropped affiliation with Manhattan, changed its name to the Boston Institute of Modern Art.

Last week Bostonians trooped to the Fine Arts Museum to see the Institute's most independent, smartest exhibition so far: "Sources of Modern Painting." Hung side by side were selected modern paintings from Manet to Dali and the i) older European pictures, 2) primitive pictures, 3) ancient pictures, 4) Japanese prints or 5) photographs with which they were definitely linked in style. No mere repetition of the now familiar facts and Grade A names, the show included such juxtapositions as an early Gauguin and a Kate

Greenaway* vignette, Eugeene Berman's wild, sad, subtle Tobias and the Angel (1938)/- and the likewise tattered Peasants in Front of a House by Louis Le Nain (1593-1648).

President of the Institute is Nathaniel Saltonstall, first cousin of Massachusetts' new Governor. Director is a young (27), bespectacled Harvardman ('33) who studied Fine Arts in college because he thought it was a snap course, wrote the music for a Hasty Pudding show, still likes playing tennis and skiing as much as working with pictures: James Sachs Plaut (rhymes with flout), who was assistant curator of paintings at the Fine Arts Museum before the Institute hired him last year. More young Bostonians went to his show last week than the Museum had seen for years.

* An English illustrator of children's books (1846-1901) whose water colors charmed the best artists and critics of her time.

/- The Old Testament (Apocrypha) relates that the Angel Raphael led the younger Tobias on a journey to collect a debt owed to blind Tobias the elder. Guided by the Angel, little Tobias returned with, among other things, a fish (see cut) whose gall restored his father's vision.

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