Art: Beautiful Doings

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Stinger. Painting and sculpture have remained the Museum's most popular promotions, but its architectural department has had probably more influence on U. S. design. Budgeted at practically nothing during the first years, in 1932 it held the first decent U. S. exhibition of the so-called "International Style" (also the first of 68 exhibitions which the Museum has circulated out of Manhattan). In 1934 it attacked Housing with such vigorous exhibits as an actual tenement room, complete with cockroaches. The Museum's architectural notes and shows have in general packed more sting than any others, and the one positively new section of last week's exhibition was a survey of modern housing in Europe and the U. S. down to the last projects of the $800,000,000 U. S. Housing Authority. Cracked Curator John McAndrew, with the pictures on the wall to back him up:

"Conservative design habits account for the curiously compromised appearance of so many PWA housing projects. Behind these and other errors stood a stupid officialdom which refused to recognize the enormous progress already made elsewhere. . . . From the first group [of U. S. H. A. designs] it is gratifyingly clear . . . that we may expect projects surpassing those of PWA both in efficiency and quality of design."

The Museum's new home, designed by Architects Philip L. Goodwin and Edward D. Stone, was evidence that the Museum can mix its own concrete: a million-dollar building on a million-dollar lot, with a sheer, severe front of plate glass, white marble and thermolux (a translucent sandwich made of spun glass insulator between two sheets of plate glass), galleries with collapsible walls, library, auditorium, projection rooms and roof terrace. The chairs and desks which furnish it (by van der Rohe, Breuer, Aalto, et al.) are in themselves a show of industrial fine art.

So What? Director Barr spent his spare time last week warning himself against the perils of Bigness and Popularity. So far the Museum has amply proved its intellectual honesty, to the dinner-table discomfiture of certain conservative trustees. Director Barr is delighted and others are somewhat surprised that the trustees have supported him so well.

Cynics might view the Museum's work as an esthete's dream—fostered by dilettantes and benefactors of great wealth—with only superficial relation to the broad life of the U. S. But Alfred Barr comes nearer home when he says, "The Museum of Modern Art is a laboratory; in its experiments the public is invited to participate." And the cynical view will not stand up very well in the presence of the Museum's new president.

Mother's Son. When, in speaking of art, Nelson Rockefeller's tongue slips and he says "geology" for "morphology," he says he wishes he could get the oil business out of his head for a minute. He is director of Creole Petroleum Corp., a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey with properties in Venezuela. He is also (since a year ago) prince and president of the huge landlording enterprise of Rockefeller Center. Nelson's actual function in both offices is under reasonable public suspicion, but it is, increasingly, that of director and president indeed.