Departure at the Modern

D'Harnoncourt's dream for the Museum of Primitive Art may have been realized last week, but the successor he groomed as director of the Museum of Modern Art was in trouble. A terse announcement from the museum said that Bates Lowry, 43, had "resigned for personal reasons." Actually, the reasons were not so much personal as mysterious. One put forth by knowledgeable observers was that President William S. Paley had demanded Lowry's resignation because he felt that Lowry had shown insufficient interest in raising funds. That was hardly enough to fire a man outright. An additional motive seemed necessary. The likely one would be that Lowry, who was somewhat brash and arrogant in manner, had managed to antagonize either an influential senior curator or official, or some trustees, or a combination of all three. Perhaps some petty incident triggered the downfall, some minor outrage in a sculpture gallery or hall.

Carrying On. As far as the younger members of the staff were concerned, Lowry's ten months in office had been most salutary. He had reorganized the staff and started a Wednesday meeting session at which heads of departments could hash out their problems. He had promoted an ambitious acquisition program, whose most notable purchase was 47 paintings from the Gertrude Stein collection for $6,500,000. He had hired enterprising young associate curators to put the maturing Modern in touch once again with the artistic underground. Most of the staff thought it a shame that Lowry had to leave almost before he had moved his furniture into the modest co-op on Park Avenue that the museum had obtained for him--even though, contrary to rumors, he had been entertaining staffers, trustees and visiting museum officials there by the score.

The trustees promised that the venturesome building and exhibition program on which Lowry had embarked would be carried on, and the younger curators could only hope that they meant it. It would be unfortunate indeed to have the nation's first and finest museum of contemporary enterprise become what some restless hippies branded it in jest shortly before Lowry took over: the mausoleum of modern art.

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