The Little League

Art news, like other news, is mostly made in the world's metropolises. But last week one of the top stories in the U.S. art world had its source in upstate New York's quiet Mohawk Valley. Improbable cause of all the excitement: the opening of a new art museum in Utica, N.Y. (pop. 100,000) and its inaugural show called "Art Across America." NEW UTICA MUSEUM DWARFS EVENTS HERE, headlined the New York Herald Tribune's big-city art writer.

Utica's Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute did not have a particularly promising start in life. Though the institute was formally founded in 1919--by two Proctor brothers who had married two Williamses who were the granddaughters of a Munson--it did not actually open until 1935, and for years was nothing more than a couple of Victorian buildings housing the vague beginnings of an art collection. But in 1955, sparked by the late Edward Wales Root, son of Elihu Root, who later willed the institute his collection of 217 topflight 20th century American paintings, the institute's five directors pushed ahead with longstanding plans to expand. Running down a list of top U.S. architects, they finally settled on Manhattan's famed Philip Johnson (TIME, Sept. 5).

The Careful Eye. Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright, designer of Manhattan's spectacular Guggenheim, Architect Johnson was willing to concede that a museum's first function is to display not itself but its art. His simple classical building is essentially a large airy courtyard covered with a coffered plastic skylight and surrounded by a graceful balcony that turns into a second floor. Designed with a careful eye on U.S. art museums' growing tendency to become civic centers, the Utica museum boasts both a theater-in-the-round and a special hideaway for the kids--a room decked out with pint-sized furniture and bright pieces of sculpture to be felt and climbed. And each gallery is equipped with pocket-size radio receivers so that a visitor can hear a taped discussion of the pictures he is inspecting.

The Splendid Resources. Last week the little speakers could have delivered quite a lecture: on view were loans from 70 small U.S. museums supported by colleges and universities and by communities of under 100,000. The museum's Director Richard McLanathan, 44, had chosen them all: he went to Searsport, Me. to get a fine igth century carved eagle, picked up the oldest painting in the show --a 1670 portrait of a two-year-old girl done with quasi-medieval flatness--from the Adams Museum in Quincy, Mass. From the Catskill (N.Y.) Public Library came a Prometheus Bound by pioneer U.S. Landscape Artist Thomas Cole; from Canajoharie, N.Y. a sensitive Italian Head by John Singer Sargent; and from Arizona State University, John James Audubon's Osprey and the Otter and the Salmon.

Among the moderns there were few surprises--a reflection, mused one critic unhappily, of the fact that "art across America today is the same as art across New York." But among the works of the earlier artists there was many a reminder of past artistic watersheds--such as the marble Eve Disconsolate of Hiram Powers, who in the mid-19th century re-established the nude as a fit subject for U.S. artists. And as Director McLanathan intended, the show did far more than turn the spotlight on Utica. It was also a tribute to all the small museums strewn across the U.S., striking proof of what McLanathan calls "the splendid resources of art in small places in America."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.