Art in a Friendly City

by FISKE KIMBALL

THE Diamond Jubilee Exhibition which opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on November 4 will assemble one hundred of the greatest paintings in America and with them one hundred of the finest drawings. Twenty-nine museums and as many private collectors have contributed to this unique display which marks the seventy-fifth year since General Grant and the Emperor of Brazil opened the Centennial Exposition of 1876. Not one of the paintings now shown was in the country when the Museum was opened.

Here are primitives from Flanders and Italy: van Eyck, van der Weyden, and Masolinos from the John G. Johnson collection, the Fra Angelico from the Fogg Museum, the Yale Pollaiuolo; from the great central period of the Italian Renaissance, the Metropolitan’s Holkham Venus, Chicago’s Tintoretto of Lucretia and Tarquin, Philadelphia’s own Veronese. Of Spanish painters, the group is led by El Greco’s View of Toledo from the Metropolitan. Of the Rembrandts, one is the St. Peter Denying Christ of the Rijksmuseum. Hals and Vermeer and Hobbema and Ruysdael are present; so are Van Dyck and Rubens, whose Flight of Lot, given by the city of Antwerp to the great Duke of Marlborough, is now on loan from the Ringling Museum. Of the Frenchmen there are Claude Lorrain and Poussin (the Triumph of Neptune painted for Richelieu and long in the Hermitage), Le Nain and Watteau and Chardin, Fragonard’s Le Billet Doux. In the beautiful English rooms of the Museum you find Constable and Turner, Hogarth, Gainsborough and Reynolds.

To these old masters, some of whom we have seen at their best during what the Germans call the Bilderwanderung, since the war, our private collectors and museums have added the marvelous wealth of the nineteenth century. Edward G. Robinson sends from the coast his Corot Womanwith Yelloie Sleeves and his Cezanne Black Clock. Horace Havemeyer, John Hay Whitney, the Carroll Tysons, Henry McIlhenny, have supplied great examples of Manet, Renoir, the Impressionists. Take Renoir. Where could one ever see together the Dancer of the Widener Collection of the National, the Bal àBougival of the Boston Museum, the Tyson Bathers, the Whitney Moulin de la Galette, the McIlhenny Judgment of Paris? Take Cézanne; there are seven of the greatest. Take Gauguin; Boston has sent the Whence come we, what are we, whither go we, which is a vast compendium of his work.

Within these hundred paintings covering seven centuries are the works of five living artists: Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Rouault, and Marcel Duchamp, whose celebrated Nude Descending the Staircase comes from Walter Arensberg.

Besides the orchestration of the paintings there is the house music of the drawings. And what mastery! Pisanello, Fouquet, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, Holbein, Brueghel, Blake, Klee, and many another not represented among the painters. All three of the Leonardo drawings in America are there, and the drawing which is the sole work of Michelangelo on this side of the water. And we rejoice to find one living American in John Marin.

It takes supreme generosity and effort to gather such an assemblage. George Widener and Henri Marceau for the paintings, Lessing Rosenwald and Carl Zigrosser for the drawings, have labored many months. Will there ever be another such? Private owners are understandably getting tired of lending, with its deprivations and risks. Paintings on panel especially tend not to move out of their accustomed climate. Several museums, the Gardner, the Frick, the Huntington, are forbidden by their charters to lend, and so are not represented.

The exhibition is not the only phase of the Musoum’s Jubilee. People are giving works of art, and money to buy others, for the enrichment of the collections — so there will be other things to see. Buying has begun, with a line Pontormo Francesco de’ Medici as Orphean, from funds given by Mrs. John Wintersteen, and there are other, bigger buys in prospect. Just having the money to buy is not enough these days. Great paintings by the old masters, of which few enough are still in private hands anywhere, are very hard to shake loose. Hopes that, as after the First World War, they would flood out of Europe have not been realized. Among Jubilee gifts, however, are paintings by Delacroix, Picasso, Braque, Chagall, Léger, and others; sculpture by Modigliani and Lipchitz.

The Philadelphia Museum has just received two oilier collections the way no one likes to get anything, by death.

Staunton Peck, vice-president of the Museum and former president of the Print Club, died at eighty-five. He left to the Museum all his prints and, ultimately, half his considerable fortune, for the building up of his collection of etchings and other prints of the past century. Staunton Peck was one of those rare men who gave up business after a first warning years ago and, on the urging of a wise and loving wife, gained a long and happy life through a consuming interest in art. He knew European and American museums as few people do. His personal collection included fine examples of Meryon, Whistler, and their followers, but his interests were very wide and he constantly gave to the Museum other choice prints and drawings, both earlier and later. All will be shown after the Jubilee drawings go.

Lisa Elkins’s ease was different. Only fifty-one, and full of life, she died August 14 after an automobile accident. When she married Bill Elkins in 1943 he had long had the passion of a collector, a collector of rare books. His Goldsmiths, his Dickenses, his Americana, gathered in the big library room at Whitemarsh, were notable. On her initiative, they turned to modern art. Between them they bought a great Van Gogh portrait, Lautree’s Folette, Renoir, Pissaro, Matisse, Rouault, Picasso, and others, besides sculpture by Degas, Renoir, Maillol, Picasso, Henry Moore, and Lipchitz. Her husband died in 1947, and now she has left to the Museum all their works of art, and has added their hospitable house on Rittenhouse Square to be sold for funds to supplement the collection. So the latest Elkins collection will come after the Jubilee to join Bill’s father’s and grandfather’s notable paintings — Dutch, Italian, French, English, and American– in the galleries they occupy meanwhile.

Happily for Philadelphia there are a number of such private collectors who are devoted to the Museum, where many of their treasures were shown this past summer and where others will be this winter.

Sturgis Ingersoll. president of the Museum, bought modern art early and well; he keeps on buying, and commissioning, and giving paintings. and especially sculpture. To please him and his sister Anna, who both paints and collects, their father, Charles Ingersoll — a director of the Pennsylvania Railroad and of the Girard Trust Company (both close to God in Philadelphia)—gave the Museum twenty years ago Picasso’s rose Woman with the Loaves. When he came to see it for the first time, he said, “Is that what I gave?”

–but he was game, it was the Museum’s first work of the modern school. To a doubter questioning that it should be accepted, George Widener answered, “It’s time we had it.”

Carroll and Helen Tyson, in their beautiful house at Chestnut Hill, take first place in modern paintings, with their Poussin, their exquisite little David, their Goya, their Manets, including the Bon Bock and the Bateau de Foulkestone, their Renoirs, headed by the Grandee Baigneusee of 1885-1887, their other Impressionists, their Van Gogh Sunflowers, and above all, their marvelous representation of Cézanne. Tyson has been guided in his exquisite choice by his own gifts as a painter.

Sam White, like Tyson a member of the Museum’s Board of Governors, posed in youth for Rodin’s seated bronze figure of The Athlete, which he owns, as he does the original bronze mask of The Man with a Broken Nose. This big collection, too, profits by a painter in the family, his wife, Vera White. Among an exceptionally large collection, they have several notably fine Matisses, Persian pottery and manuscripts, Peruvian textiles, African sculpture.

Henry and Esther Clifford — he is Curator of Paintings at the Museum — go in more for the twentieth century, though they begin with Rousseau’s great Tiger in the jungle. They have fine Picassos, including a Harlequin of 1901, and paintings by Braque, Chirico, Gris, Miró, Klee, Eilshemius, Berman, and the Mexicans. They are not afraid of new names.

Youngest of the group is Henry MeIlhenny, Curator of Decorative Arts at the Museum, a post which leaves him freedom to collect paintings — us does his sister, Mrs. John Wintersteen, who has Delacroix, Degas, Renoir, and Picasso. Trained at the Fogg, he has systematically assembled representative masterpieces of the nineteenth century at its best. There must be a David, and there is the double portrait of Pius VII and Cardinal Caprara; there must be an Ingres, and there is the Comtesse de Tournon, which he doesn’t seem to mind my calling Madame Veuve Cliquot. There must be a Delacroix, and there is The Death of Sardanapalus; a Cézanne figure subject, a Cézanne still life, and a Cézanne landscape, and there are superb examples of all three. There must be a. Degas, of just the right period and subject. Faced with these specifications, a dealer said, “We’ll have to paint one for you”; but he didn’t have to model the Degas bronze Dancer in tutu or paint, the Renoir portrait, Renoir landscape, Seurat figures, Van Gogh landscape (the Rain Effect), or of greatest rarity, the Lautree Bar at the Moulin Rouge. Henry McIIhenny, like most of the Philadelphia collectors, recognizes that living artists must live in order to paint. He has contemporary American works, and gave Franklin Watkins the commission to do the big Death and Resurrection.

Of course there is the Barnes Collection, which is in a class by itself. One wonders what its fate will be: one would like to think that in the future Mr. Barnes’s pictures will be as accessible as Mrs. Gardner’s pictures are today.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the dean of American art institutions, has lately been revivified under a new president. It has a wonderful series of American works acquired by gift and by purchase for nearly a century and a. half. Now, like the Metropolitan, it is trying to round out the series. It has issued a circular listing the artists not represented, or inadequately represented, whose works it desires. This, besides the dead, lists a hundred living painters and fifty fixing sculptors. Just to be on it is an accolade, though artists could do with fewer accolades and more sales.

The Academy, besides maintaining its big national annuals, also makes fuller showings of the work of living Philadelphians. The Museum pioneered this in group shows of Arthur Carles with Franklin Watkins, and Carroll Tyson with George Biddle. The Academy took over the task with the founding of their Philadelphia Artists Gallery, where its series of one-man shows has reached over forty. In the past few years the artists have included Tyson, Robert Riggs, Morris Blackburn, Francis Speight, Hobson Pittman, Walter Stucmpfig, Benton Spruance, Leon Karp, and Julius Bloch. After its big annual water-color show in November, it plans to show in December Abraham Hawkins and Daniel Rasmussen. Hawkins, who began as a musician, has worked from realistic painting to abstract. While there will be some of his early work, most is recent, some on a basis of American Indian design. Rasmussen, who will show drawings and sculpture as well as oils, has found inspiration especially in the circus: horses and horses with riders.

People are talking again about contemporary British painting, much in eclipse since the triumph of the French under the championship of Roger Fry. I got a good glimpse of it a year ago in Raymond Mortimer’s Bloomsbury house, hanging on the walls and painted on the walls. Now the English-Speaking Union is sponsoring a show over here, which will be in Baltimore for the month of November. There will be fifty or sixty pictures chosen by Sir Kenneth Clark, Mortimer, and Robin Ironside, which means chosen well. There are the English Impressionists, from Sickert onward, and the younger, more progressive group headed by Graham Sutherland and Duncan Grant. Others represented are Wilson Steer, John Piper, Victor Pasmore, David Jones, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Augustus John. In other words, a good show. People in America are beginning to buy the younger Englishmen and we shall certainly hear more of them. Here is a first opportunity to see them on this side.

Many of the same men will appear from December 19 through January 7 in a different show at the Pennsylvania Academy, where twenty-five pictures from abroad will be supplemented by seventy-five from American collections.

The Carnegie Institute at Pittsburgh—which had to abandon its big international exhibitions during the war and substitute surveys of American painting — is strongly international again. It will now be a biennial exhibition instead of an annual, the resumption being made possible by the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust. Of three hundred and sixty paintings shown this year, some two hundred and fifty are from eleven countries abroad.

This is Homer Saint-Gaudens’s last show at the Carnegie Institute, where he has been Director of Fine Arts since 1922. He is being succeeded by Gordon Washburn, previously director at Buffalo and Providence. As he was accustomed to do before the war, Saint-Gaudens traveled all over Europe, devoting five months to a selection from European galleries, exhibitions, and the studios of artists themselves. This time Washburn went along as observer. As is traditional also, the show aims at a balanced representation from each land, “not limited to any one trend, but giving each present day tendency its proportionate representation.”That means that there are academic paintings, especially from countries away from the artistic center, Paris, and that France (which has indisputably been the center of creation for over a hundred years) has no more pictures in the show than Great Britain — fifty-two each.

When it comes to awarding their big prizes, the jury, while also “balanced,” is more favorable to creation: Marcel Gromaire, Paris; Sir Gerald Kelly, president the Royal Academy; Charles Burchfield, Buffalo; Franklin Watkins, Philadelphia; in addition to Saint-Gaudens, chairman.