Art: Beautiful Doings

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Just off Fifth Avenue on 54th Street, touched by the midday shadow of Rockefeller Center's enormous slab, stood the old four-story and nine-story mansions of the Rockefeller family. Town dwellings of the elder and younger John D. Rockefeller for, respectively, 40 and 2 5 years, the houses were abandoned two years ago to wreckers. Last week the site became part of a long garden. In the garden were evergreens, arbors, trees, wattle screens, and sculpture by Lachaise, Despiau, Zorach, Lipchitz. One fair spring night it was filled with hundreds of men with starched white bosoms, and hundreds of rustling ladies. Back of them stood a new, long, spacious building faced with marble and glass; inside it other crowds could be seen, swishing past its plate-glass panels like frilly fish in a bright aquarium. Occasion for these beautiful doings was the formal opening of the long-awaited, permanent home of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art (since 1937 temporarily camped in offices and basement galleries of the TIME & LIFE Building in Rockefeller Center). In equal parts swank, sober and glamorous, the company (more than 6,000) included such varied personages as Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, ex-Premier Juan Negrin of Spain, Sculptor Constantin Brancusi. For them and for New York World's Fair visitors until October 1, the new Museum was decked out with a big, cream-of-the-crop exhibition of "Art in Our Time" paintings, sculpture, architecture, prints, photography, industrial art, and a historical cycle of movies from 1895 to 1935. The Rockefeller-sited Museum also acquired, for its tenth anniversary, a Rockefeller president: brisk, hefty, sunny Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, 30-year-old second son of John D. Jr. As treasurer of the Museum since 1937, Nelson raised the funds for the new building (on which only $200,000 of $2,000,000 remained last week unpaid). In picking him to succeed frosty-headed A. (for Anson) Conger Goodyear, hard-working president since 1929, the Board of Trustees well pleased the person who was not only a founder but a moving spirit of the Museum: Nelson's publicity-hating mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. That the presidency of the Museum is no longer—if it ever was—merely a family, clique, or society function, the principal speakers of the evening made abundantly clear. Sample (Franklin D. Roosevelt speaking by radio from the White House) :

"In encouraging the creation and enjoyment of beautiful things we are furthering democracy itself. That is why this museum is a citadel of civilization. . . . Because it has been conceived as a national institution, the Museum can enrich and invigorate our cultural life. . . . The opportunity before the Museum of Modern Art is as broad as the whole United States. .. ."