Rush at the Whitney

To raise money for their building fund, the four-year-old New York Artists Equity Association offered the public a grab-bag art show at the Whitney Museum. The terms were challengingly simple. Admission: $100 a couple and take your pick of more than 500 pieces of donated painting and sculpture--some of them by such top-notchers as Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Ben Shahn, Isabel Bishop and William Zorach. The only catch: the art was all untitled and signatures were taped over with adhesive.

Art lovers jumped at the challenge. By 3 p.m. one day last week--four hours before the doors opened--they began to queue up outside the museum with camp stools, box lunches and Thermos jugs of Martinis. At 7 p.m. the Whitney opened its doors and the 1,000-odd lined up outside began to pour in.

First customer in was a woman from Goshen, N.Y. who was looking for a sculpture by Gwen Lux that she had seen in the papers. But in the melee she overlooked it and placed a red sticker, sealing her choice, on a ceramic by somebody else. Other red stickers blossomed on frames and pedestals at the rate of five a minute. One man, pausing to pose for photographers in front of his favorite, neglected to plant his sticker first; he turned a moment later to find another bargain hunter had tagged it while his back was turned. A woman, looking for a painting by John Marin (whose work was not in the show) spent $200 worth of stickers, only to be disappointed when she learned the artists' names. "Well, I certainly got some stinkers!" she muttered. "Who ever heard of them?" Among other buyers were Fleur Cowles of Look magazine, who got abstractions by Hans Hoffmann and George L. K. Morris, Novelist Kathleen (Forever Amber) Winsor, who got a landscape, and the University of Georgia museum, which picked up three paintings and two sculptures.

By 8:30 the rush was over and all but a few of the pictures had been spoken for. Artists Equity had $52,000 toward its building fund, and nobody had been seriously hurt.

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