THE NECESSITY OF THE OLD MASTERS
Koninck's and Ruysdael's and Rubens' landscapes, Sassetta's St. Francis
episode, Ter Barch's "Concert,'' Tintoretto's "Man with Long White
Beard,'' Titian's "Self-Portrait,'' Velasquez's portrait, Venneer's "Pearl
Necklace," all three Watteaus, van der Weyden's two portraits, and
Konrad Witz's remarkably delicate yet firm "Crucifixion."
There are, in addition, some fifty or sixty other very successful
pictures present-and I say successful advisedly, for the old masters can
be as uneven as the modern ones. In view of the notoriously bad taste
usually shown by museum officials in the field of modern art, one is
amazed to see how largely right the specialists attached to the Army
were in deciding which pictures of the Berlin collections deserved most
to
be
saved from the Russians. Perhaps it was because they were guided
by tradition. . . .
While I am on the subject let me advise those still interested in the
old masters to pay a visit to the Philadelphia Museum, something I
myself had the opportunity to do for the first time only recently-and
sympotomatically enough, in connection with the Matisse exhibition
there. The Johnson, Wilstach, and other collections make the Philadel–
phia Museum's painting section superior in quality to that of the Metro–
politan, and in some respects, particularly the Flemish primitives, it can
more than hold its own with the National Gallery in Washington.
Clement Greenberg
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