One Man's Taste

But each for the joy of the working,

And each, in his separate star, Shall draw the Thing as he sees It

For the God of Things as They are!

With this epigram from the unfashionable poet Rudyard Kipling carved in its marble-slathered lobby, the U.S.'s newest museum throws down an elegant gauntlet at the feet of all that has been fashionable in recent art. The challenger is A. & P. Heir Huntington Hartford, 52, who considers abstract art to be a social menace; the challenge is his new Gallery of Modern Art, which assumes "modern," in the art sense, to mean from 1800 until not too lately. After a series of quite fashionable previews--for the press, social, professional and charity cliques--the long-abuilding museum last week opened to the public.

What stands above Manhattan's Columbus Circle is a $9,000,000 statement of Hartford's taste. In a broadside published as an advertisement in 1955 in six New York newspapers, he stated the thesis that "the purpose of great art is a moral one" and came out for "the old lesson which Beauty has taught for so many years, the lesson of goodness and kindness and strength which has caused poets to identify it with truth." He deplored "the diseases which infect the world of painting today--of obscurity, confusion, immorality, violence" and said that "one of the prime requisites of greatness in art is to be easily understood." To Hartford's critics, these goals spell sentimentality and escapism, not "Things as They are," although the history of art is full of painters who prove the contrary. The sad fact about the new museum is that the collection it houses does not come close to illustrating Hartford's goals and thus hands an easy victory to the critics.

Punched Shaft. The building, designed by Edward Durell Stone, is a shaft of polished Vermont marble punched by 1,472 portholes, its Venetian fac,ade bent to the arc of Columbus Circle. Inside, is a giant staircase that spirals around the intrusive service core and fire stairs required by city ordinances, and makes landings at the galleries.

While Stone has manipulated the cramped spaces as best he can, he is more in his element with the interior decoration. Macassar ebony, solid bronze doors, parqueted floors, anodized aluminum sequins, red pile carpets, even potted palms abound (see color page). Two of the museum's nine floors are surrendered to an espresso and cocktail lounge and a 52-seat restaurant called the Gauguin Room. And since Hartford contends that a museum is "really like a church," there is a 3,500-pipe Aeolian-Skinner organ.

Pedagogical Planks. Hartford began buying art twelve years ago, after deciding to build his museum. Now he has some 80-odd pictures and a few sculptures. His possessions, following his credo, are less esthetic choices than planks in a pedagogical platform. The bulk of the collection dates from before 1900. There are quaint, good things, such as Sir Edward Burne-Jones's eight pre-Raphaelite panels of the Perseus legend. There are great artists with bad works: a Degas copy of a Poussin, and a grotesquely tortured Orozco Slave.

In a small town without a museum, Hartford's collection would be instructive, for most of the names are respected and familiar. The collection has Gericault, Courbet, Corot, Puvis de Chavannes, Moreau, Monet, Mary Cassatt, Pissarro, Vuillard, Derain, Turner, John Singer Sargent, George Inness, Reginald Marsh and--among sculptors--Houdon, Renoir, Epstein and Davidson. Mostly they are early, derivative works or mediocre curiosities. And two of the newest paintings, hung in a hip-pocket gallery built just for them, are pretentious and overwhelming Dalis, including a 1959 commission called The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, cluttered with meaningless iconography.

Home for Touring Art. Yet with all its hesitancies, contradictions and shortcomings, the Gallery of Modern Art is a much-needed asset to New York. Its director is Carl J. Weinhardt Jr., 36, a quiet man who began as a Met curator and was director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He points out that "every year in less-frequented centers throughout the country, stellar and unique assemblages of art are created which do not reach the New York public." Manhattan missed an unusual show of Barbizon painters organized and sent on tour by the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor (TIME, Dec. 14, 1962), for example. Weinhardt promises not only to organize large shows of his own--the first is a 300-odd-work retrospective of Surrealist Pavel Tchelitchew now on view--but also to let Manhattan see some shows that its existing museums have turned down.

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