Industrial Ingredient

Art and Business, by tradition strangers, have of recent years had their names linked by trade-boosters seeking to ennoble Business by a marriage above its esthetic station. Art's lovers, proud of their mistress and fearful lest she be debased as a handmaiden, have often denied the rumors of intimacy, assailed the Business motives.

That is why it seemed unusual and significant last week to hear gracious, scholarly Henry Watson Kent, secretary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, than whom Art has no more steadfast devotee, say at the anniversary ceremonies of the Yale School of Fine Arts:

"Art, in its truest sense, has come to this country as something belonging to the day and hour and to all the people. . . . This great country for many years has been building up enormous industries, and it has learned that if it is to succeed in rivaling the same kind of industries in other lands, it must take into consideration the ingredient which gives many of them their greatest value--the quality of art. It has only now determined upon that rivalry. It has now come to the point of desiring to excel in this quality of art as well as in technical, mechanical, or practical excellence, to which it has bent all of its endeavors heretofore."

Charwoman's Son

Theophilus Joseph, Negro, is a Harlem elevator man. His wife Henrietta works in a laundry. She wants their 19-year-old foster-son Ronald to follow his foster-father's footsteps and run an elevator. Ronald is not unwilling, but he hopes that perhaps the world holds for him something more purposeful than an elevator. Ronald's reason: last week he had 60 watercolors, charcoal and crayon drawings --athletes in action, ships in dock--on exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had been singled out as the most promising current artist product of New York City's public school system.

Born in Dominica, West Indies, a charwoman's son, Artist Joseph was adopted by his foster-parents at the age of one. He stayed in the West Indies for eleven years. From an early age he drew, told other children what was wrong with their drawings, bought penny crayons. At eleven he was taken to Manhattan, where he attended a public grammar school. His drawing teacher encouraged him to continue at Stuyvesant High School, where Dr. Henry E. Fritz conducts special Saturday drawing classes and arranges an annual Metropolitan exhibit for the 30 most talented children (15 boys, 15 girls). "You needn't congratulate yourselves on your talent," Dr. Fritz tells his proteges. "It isn't any fault of yours." Ronald Joseph has stayed with the Fritz class for six years. He was the first to be given a special section in the Metropolitan. So far his success has not spoiled him. He says: "I have a fifty-fifty chance of doing something good."

Britain Buys

Two English peers recently parted with heirlooms for fat prices, and London's famed National Gallery was able to announce last week that it had been presented with two of the greatest paintings in Great Britain. The Duke of Northumberland sold Titian's Cornaro Family. which had been owned by his family since 1656. Titian's red-robed greybeards and red-hosed urchins who kneel before a crucifix, may be Yendraminis rather than Cornaros, but that scarcely affects the painting's value. The Duke received $610.000.*

The Earl of Pembroke sold the Wilton Diptych, a 14th century anonymous English masterpiece in tempera, representing the devotions of Richard II (in one panel) before the Madonna and Child (in the other). The Earl was paid $450.000. Believed to have been at Whitehall in Elizabethan times, the diptych is known to have been in Wilton House, ancestral home of the Earls of Pembroke, in 1724.

The paintings were bought with equal contributions by the government and private benefactors. Among the most lavish of the latter: Silkman Samuel Courtauld. $100.000; Sir Joseph Duveen, $80.000: Lord Rothermere, $50.000.

*The world's record price for a painting is $750,000 paid by a U. S. syndicate in 1928 for Raphael's Madonna di Siena.