Autumn Harvest

Three U.S. museums were exhibiting important new acquisitions:

P:The Los Angeles County Museum showed off El Greco's magnificent, somberly calm St. Andrew.* Alongside the masterpiece, the museum displayed a fascinating find: a sheet of rare El Greco drawings in red chalk--preliminary sketches for St. Andrew and for another work (the head of a spectator in The Despoiling of Christ). For decades, the El Greco sketches had been misfiled in a British collector's album of drawings by Francisco Goya. They were picked up by Dr. William R. Valentiner, the museum's treasure hunter, for a bargain $2,000.

P:The Dallas Museum of Fine Arts displayed a looming mural (18 ft. by 10 ft.) by Mexican Artist Rufino Tamayo (commissioned last year in the hope that it would help eliminate anti-Mexican prejudice in Texas). Titled El Hombre, the mural shows a monolithic, foreshortened giant, his back to the viewer, growing like a strange modernistic tower into the sky. His legs, bulging with orange-colored, cubist muscles, are firmly earthbound; but his upper half reaches into the stars. Explained Artist Tamayo: "I wanted to show man as a rational being going to higher places." Dallas, by & large, was delighted. Mayor Bob Thornton grunted appreciatively: "Looks like he's got his feet in the mud . . . Been that way myself."

P: Houston's Museum of Fine Arts held its first show of 36 Italian and Spanish paintings of the 15th to 18th century, a "permanent loan" from Collector Samuel H. Kress, 90, the dime-store tycoon (TIME, April 27). Among the best of Houston's windfall: a warm-hued Nativity and Adoration of the Shepherds by Titian and his brother Francesco, fascinating with its bright but strangely stormy sky; Goya's A Maja and Two Toreros, its gaily clad figures oddly accented by the sinister tones of its wooded background. Under Kress conditions, Houston would not have gotten the pictures unless they could be displayed in an air-conditioned gallery. New air conditioning was contributed by rich, young (40) Oilman John Blaffer. Said Blaffer recently: "I'm a whisky and trombone man myself. [But] Texas is reaching an artistic and cultural stage comparable to New York in the 1850's."

-St. Andrew was a Galilean fisherman and brother of St. Peter. During the reign of Nero, he was crucified by being bound to a decussate (X-shaped) cross. In the painting owned by Los Angeles, the martyr supports one shaft of the cross and raises a hand in blessing. In other versions, El' Greco pictured the scene from various angles and in different moods.

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