Art Chronicle
Metropolitan Storage Warehouse
A
MONC THE PHENOMENA
of P"''nt-day cultu<al octivity none ;,
more curious than the prevalent public apathy regarding the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. While the unfortunate opera-house of the same name is
dissected almost nightly, the Metropolitan Museum, which swallows up a
large annual grant from the city treasury, darkens the upper reaches of
Fifth Avenue with such a forbidding monumentality that it has become
as removed from esthetic reproach as the Manhattan Storage Warehouse.
No one seems concerned over the dwindling annual attendance, which has
now fallen below that of the Chicago Art Institute, although Chicago ha_s
half the population of New York.
I was recently recollecting that I myself had felt no impulse to pene·
trate those gloomy precincts for a number of years (except for an occa–
sional visit to the Egyptian sculpture-hall) when a chance encounter with
the November-1940 Bulletin sent me thither with an alacrity I would not
have believed possible.
It
was surely inconceivable that. an organization
with even the most modest esthetic .standards could sponsor anything as
insulting to human taste as this ordinarily innocuous pamphlet. (The mood
was appropriately set by the drawing on the cover, which depicted a group
of gentlemen in business-suits inspecting the museum's main entrance-hall,
conceived with about the stylistic distinction of a twenty-year-old advertise–
ment for Hart, Schaffner
&
Marx.) The remainder of the bulletin, as a
sort of homage to National Art Week, was given over to American paint–
ings from the museum's permanent collection.
A glance at the galleries themselves showed that the bulletin had
done complete justice. The collection was reminiscent of an annual show
at some conservative summer art-colony. There was an obvious attempt on
the part of the purchasing committee to gather in works that were cheery
and 'modern,' and this showed a difference in kind at least from what one
sed to encounter in these halls. But tasteless splashes of raucous color
tted into contours that serve no purpose beyond the illustration of nature
are not enough to make a picture 'modern,' and I for one am in no way
cheered by gay colors unless they are controlled into a compositional
abric with some personal distinction. Passing from canvas to canvas, one
ndeavors to puzzle out the esthetic criterion that determined the selection
f each individual work. It could hardly have been because the artists were
ell-known, for many of them were unheard-of. (Later inquiry disclosed
at several were executed by young ladies in their early twenties, whose
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