Be Kind

Until last week, museums were generally unkind to Thomas Hart Benton and Benton was unkind to museums. They resemble graveyards, he remarked ten years ago, "run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait . . . Nobody goes to museums. I'd like to sell [my paintings] to saloons . . ."

Billy Rose took the tough-talking Missourian up on that notion, hung Benton's nude Persephone in his Diamond Horseshoe for three months. Last week a mellower Benton mildly announced that he was lending the same painting to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum for exhibition in March. Saloons, he has decided, "are too unstable. Besides, there are too many women in them now."

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