Shifting Rapidly

The citizens of Detroit built their first museum of art eight years before they built their first automobile back in 1896. They have been restyling both ever since. The first acquisition of the Detroit Institute of Arts was a $2,500 mythological oil called Reading the Story of Oenone, an object lesson in severe academia by U.S. Artist Francis D. Millet. Final proof that the museum subsequently made greater and more thorough acquisitions had to wait until last week when it opened its new $3,785,000 wing, doubling previous gallery space.

Before, space was so tight that Millet's Oenone hung in a rack in the basement -- which, considering its slick blah-ness, was not a bad idea. There are plenty of other works that deserve to be seen: six Rembrandts, for example --including Henry Ford IIs gift, A Woman Weeping. The museum has Jan van Eyck's St. Jerome in His Study and Rogier van der Weyden's St. Jerome in the Desert, both dating from the Renaissance. There are also such heady items as El Greco's St. Francis in Ecstasy and a 5 ft. by 6 ft. altarpiece by the evanescent baroque master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

Snook Cocker. Detroit's American panorama ranks among the best in U.S. museumdom, from a version of John Singleton Copley's 1778 Havana harbor scene Watson and the Shark to Whis tler's impressionistic Nocturne in Black and Gold: the Falling Rocket. Many such acquisitions occurred during the 21-year administration of the museum's late Director William R. Valentiner, onetime assistant at Berlin's Kaiser-Friedrich Museum and a Met curator, who died in 1958. Valentiner provided the museum with highly professional personnel and standards. By way of relief, Valentiner also had a capacity for snook-cockers. In 1932, he and Edsel B. Ford got the Mexican Communist revolutionary, Diego Rivera, to paint murals of the city's industries in the museum's garden court. Rivera slyly turned one worker-model's head, whose hat bore a sign saying "We Want Beer," so that it read just "We Want." Detroit citizens huffed and puffed about the fresco, but Ford defended the work, insisting that Rivera "was trying to express his idea of the spirit of Detroit."

Fords were still in the forefront of the black-tie throng of 513 patrons and benefactors on hand for last week's $100-a-plate inaugural. In particular, there was Mrs. Edsel B. Ford, 70, who gave $1,000,000 toward the three-story, polished granite building, and then refused to let the wing be named for her or to give a speech after dinner in the 60-ft.-tall, slate-floored sculpture court.

Coo Wha Zee. To appreciate it all, Museum Director Willis Woods led such guests as Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh through the new galleries. There for the admiring were 13 brand-new acquisitions, ranging from two 5,000-year-old Cycladic figures to Miro's surreal Autoportrait II. Other works unveiled that evening were Chicago Realist Ivan Le Lorraine Albright's 1926 Burgomaster with A Key (see opposite page) and Nicolas de Largilliere's 1703 Portrait of an Alderman of Paris, the $50,000 gift of a cousin of Mrs. Ford's, Ernest Kanzler.

Detroit's pleased burghers admired these portraits of fellow solid citizens --and braced themselves to fill another $5,300,000 wing already under construction. But somehow they managed to restrain themselves as they passed John Chamberlain's contemporary sculpture Coo Wha Zee. The work, a welded clump of crushed automobile parts, looks a little unsafe at any price.

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