On the National Gallery

Since the late Andrew Mellon's new National Gallery of Art opened its bronze doors on Washington's Constitution Mall (TIME, March 24), many a critical connoisseur has looked Philanthropist Mellon's gigantic gift straight in the pink marble mouth. Architects have grumbled that the National Gallery is as massively old-fashioned as Grant's Tomb. Artists complained that the gallery ought to have made some provision for accepting contemporary art. Connoisseurs sniffed that its collection is sadly deficient in French art.

Dean Joseph Hudnut, of Harvard's Graduate School of Design, has a seeing eye for architectural pretense. He has paid his respects to the campuses of the large Eastern colleges in a little pamphlet called The Gothick Universitie; he has likened Washington's unfinished Jefferson Memorial to "an egg on a pantry shelf in the midst of a geometric Sahara." Last week Dean Hudnut took a look at the National Gallery. Wrote he (in an article in the Magazine of Art):

"[It] invites at every step the astonishment of the visitor, seducing him with expense and weight, crushing him under its firm assertion of authority. All of which adds nothing of delight or of value to the objects exhibited--nothing, that is to say, which could not have been added simply, directly, unpretentiously, at one tenth of the cost. . . . [It] is the death mask of an ancient culture."

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