Art: Newark & Dana

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Visitors to New York City this summer may banquet on fine art until they bust. The Metropolitan Museum has lavished its space, taste and scholarship on "Life in America" as artists have seen it through 200 years (TIME, May 8). The new, glassy Museum of Modern Art holds a festal exhibition of "Art in Our Time" (TIME, May 22). At the World of Tomorrow, 1,214 examples of "American Art Today" show contemporary ferment among U. S. artists; not far away are hung 400 serene successes by Old and still Older Masters (TIME, June 26). To assemble all this took the combined resources of a World's Fair and a big city.

Comparatively unsung across the Hudson, the Newark Museum last week completed its array of summer attractions. Reconstructed in its big, walled garden and restored to the last detail was a one room building of local sandstone, dated 1784—the oldest schoolhouse still standing in Newark. In the airy Museum itself were: 1) a full-scale reconstruction of a Tibetan lamasery altar; 2) fine lace and silverware; 3) "The Human Body & Its Care," an exhibit featuring a skeleton; 4) American "primitive'' paintings; 5) 200 electrically driven, slow-motion models showing all the physical principles used "in the art and science of mechanics'"; 6) a retrospective show of paintings by burly, grey-haired Joseph Stella, one of the first and most gifted "modern" U. S. artists.

To visiting professionals in the arts this catholic display had an interest which none of the big city shows could boast. It proved that the Newark Museum remains the seat of the most sensible program of small museumship yet formulated in the U. S. This program took shape 30 years ago when the Museum was created as an adjunct to the Newark Public Library by an extraordinary librarian, the late John Cotton Dana. Dana's fame as a museum director has spread farther and wider ever since.

A tall, salty Vermonter who just missed being a preacher, John Cotton Dana became a surveyor for his health, then took charge of the public libraries of Denver, Springfield, Mass, and Newark (beginning in 1902). He believed in making books useful. He started the first children's library in the U. S., the first business branch libraries, the first extensive public files of periodicals and newspapers. On the fourth floor at Newark he set aside two rooms and a corridor for Art; in 1909 it was incorporated as a museum and received $10,000 from the town to buy an Oriental collection. Director Dana wrote a little piece called The Museum of Interest and the Museum of Awe. Said he:

"If a museum does not care to be of immediate practical use to the people who maintain it, help them to more intelligent enjoyment of daily life by adding interest to the common interest of that life, and seeks only to arouse astonishment, awe, and a harmful reverence by means of objects rare, old. costly, and of aristocratic history, it needs only acquire such objects, place them on walls or pose them in cases, speak with seeming authority of Art, Beauty, Esthetics, Styles, Periods, and the like, and rest content."