The Show's the Thing

It was the sort of thing that could only happen in an America suddenly hooked on art: one day last week the Mona Lisa passed Whistler's Mother on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Mona was wending her enigmatic way from Washington, via air-conditioned van, to Manhattan, where she went on view for 3 1/2 weeks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite rain, slush and bone-cracking cold, a crowd of 23,872 queued up in three-block-long lines on the first day to make frostbitten obeisance before the lady with the greenish face in her bulletproof, heat-and-humidity-controlled shrine.

Whistler's Mother (correct title: Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1, Portrait of the Painter's Mother) was en route to Atlanta, to appear as an official gesture of sympathy by the French government for the death of 121 Georgians who were killed when a plane chartered by the Atlanta Art Association crashed at Orly Airport near Paris last June. Whistler's Mother's traveling companion was The Penitent St. Mary Magdalen, by the 17th century French painter Georges de La Tour, also lent to Atlanta by the Louvre. The arrival of the paintings in Atlanta was one of the biggest events since the opening of Gone With the Wind clogged Peachtree Street with hoopskirts and Hollywood types. Says Director Wilhelmus Bryan: ''Having these paintings here means a lot to us. It makes a wonderful start for our plans to build a $3,000,000 art center as a memorial to the crash victims."

Art Is Big News. All over the U.S., art has become big news, and a public conditioned to the excitement of recent museum spectaculars has responded in droves. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo last year drew 782,800 visitors --more than New York's Museum of Modern Art or Guggenheim Museum, more than Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, more than Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, more than Florence's Uffizi, more than London's Tate Gallery--and five times as many as its own previous high.

Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art last year attracted 4,291,200 visitors and topped even 1961, the memorable "year of the Rembrandt." when more than 1,000,000 saw the museum's bought-at-auction $2,300,000 Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. Chicago's Art Institute showed a nice rise to 884,500. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts got a 20% increase in attendance, to 754,000.

"I Saw It." Though even a viewer himself might not be able to separate how much of his own feeling was curiosity and how much was appreciation, there was plainly plenty of tourism, celebrity-seeking, and status-hunting about the current crush to see the Mona Lisa. Half a million people ''passed in front of it," to use a gallery phrase, in the 3 1/2 weeks in Washington, assuring the museum of a record attendance in 1963, giving thousands little more than a reason to say, "I saw it." There was a general atmosphere of keep-moving which interfered with tranquil inspection, but then, all around were other pictures, many as deserving of close inspection, which got little attention from the crowds.

But even when the attraction is a visiting show rather than the museum's usual collection, millions clearly go to galleries for the pure pleasure of seeing pictures. The attractions at Albright-Knox were a big exhibition of popularly understandable and understandably popular paintings by Andrew Wyeth (TIME, Nov. 2), which drew 247,800 visitors, and a Van Gogh collection, which pulled 95,000 more. The same Van Gogh show accounted for Boston's attendance rise, and Los Angeles County Museum remembers Van Gogh was a big puller in 1959. New York's Museum of Modern Art earned a healthy increase over 1961 by showing Marc Chagall's stained-glass windows for Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Israel, which had the good ladies of local Hadassah groups out in phalanxes.

With or without the hoopla, Americans have become ardent supporters of museums, attentive readers of art news. Scarcely had Leonardo's Mona Lisa been removed from its shrouding of maroon drapery (which the gallery force had christened "Mona's kimona"), when a courtly ceremony took place in Washington's National Gallery. Italian Charge d'Affaires Gian Luigi Milesi Ferretti, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Attorney General Robert Kennedy stood before a throng of art enthusiasts to unveil two small paintings on wood illustrating the labors of Hercules by the 15th century Italian painter Pollaiuolo, recently recovered in California after having been stolen from the Uffizi by the Nazis during World War II.

Reflecting the Kennedys' current disenchantment with De Gaulle, Bobby Kennedy preferred to recall the Mona Lisa's Florentine extraction, looked at the two Pollaiuolos and murmured: "This makes three great Italian paintings which have been loaned to us this year."

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