Milestones, Aug. 29, 1955

Marriage Revealed. Diego Rivera, 69, famed Mexican mural painter; and Emma Hurtado, 39, dancer-model; he for the fifth time, she for the second; on July 29, as he made ready to leave for Russia for a cancer operation; in Mexico City.

Died. Lemuel Ayers, 40, top stage (Pajama Game, Camino Real) and screen (Meet Me in St. Louis) set and costume designer, Broadway co-producer (Kiss Me Kate) ; after long illness; in Manhattan.

Died. Edmond Joseph Eugène Marie Jaspar, 49, Dutch-born lawyer, businessman, secretary-general of the Benelux Customs and Economic Union since its founding in 1946; of a heart attack; in Brussels.

Died. Fiske Kimball, 66, longtime (1925-55) director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, restorer of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and Robert E. Lee's Stratford (Va.) home; of a stroke; in Munich, Germany. Kimball became director when the museum was only partially built, developed it into one of America's best, acquired the Gallatin Collection (e.g., Picasso's Three Musicians), the $2,000,000 Arensberg Collection (e.g., Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase).

Died. Fernand Léger, 74, French "machine-age primitive" painter; of a heart attack; in Gif-sur-Yvette, France. Regarded as one of the masters of School-of-Paris art, Leger (rhymes with beige-hay), the son of a Norman farmer, went to Paris in 1898 to study painting, earned his living as a photo retoucher. In 1910 he experimented with and abandoned the cubist techniques of Braque and Picasso, was later influenced by Primitivist Rousseau, moved on to a preoccupation with quilt-like color patterns, bunchy human figures in machine-like forms. After living in the U.S. for 4½ years during World War II, he painted The Builders, which won this year's $4,000 Sao Paulo international prize; he also designed sketches for the two 30-ft. murals in the U.N. General Assembly building. An off-and-on Communist, he was eulogized by the French Communist Party as "our comrade."

Died. Thomas Reed Powell, 75, longtime Harvard Law School professor (1925-50), top constitutional law authority, member of the fact-finding board that averted a national railway strike in 1941; after long illness; in Boston.

Died. Herbert Putnam, 93, longtime (1899-1939) Librarian of Congress; in Woods Hole, Mass. Appointed by President McKinley, Dr. Putnam transformed the library's haphazard collection of less than a million volumes into one of the world's largest (over 10 million books and pamphlets), developed a new system of classification, supervised the purchase of a valuable European collection of incunabula, including a Gutenberg Bible.