Persia in Piccadilly

White-tired limousines and archaic London taxicabs rolled under the smoky colonnade of Burlington House in Piccadilly last week bringing notables to the open ing of the great International Exhibition of Persian Art. Waiting for them inside the building were exhibits with an insured value of $30,000,000: crown jewels from the Shah, boxes of miniatures from Tur key, rugs, bronzes, ceramics and textiles from the U. S., France, Germany and 21 other nations. The show was designed to follow the great Flemish and Italian exhibitions at the Royal Academy. But there was this difference : nearly every picture in the Flemish and Italian shows was familiar by reputation at least not only to critics but to the average intelligent tour ist. The Persian exhibition brought to gether for the first time thousands of objects from Persia, from unknown sources all over Europe hitherto absolutely inaccessible (TIME, Aug. 1 8).

Visitors on opening day received from the two crimson-gowned flunkies of the Royal Academy imposing leaflets which announced many royal and titled Patrons of the exhibit. But only a second Sherlock Holmes would have spotted in the roster the name of the man who conceived of the exhibition, sold the idea to the Royal Academy and persuaded the tycoons of a half dozen countries to lend it their treasures: Arthur Upham Pope of San Mateo, Calif.

Director Pope, 50 and super-kinetic, was graduated from Brown University in 1904.

He has been a professor of philosophy of esthetics, is now Advisory Curator of Mohammedan Art in the Chicago Art Institute and Adviser in Persian Art to the Pennsylvania Art Museum in Philadelphia.

Also he is Honorary Adviser in Art to the Persian Government. He has always been wildly enthusiastic about Persian art. It is Brown legend that he helped work his way through college by selling rare oriental rugs to slightly bewildered undergraduates.

Mr. Pope still maintains his home in San Mateo, near San Francisco, but he has not been in it for four years. He lives with a huge pile of suitcases, his wife Dr. Phyllis Ackerman (an authority on Gothic tapestries) and the family mascot, a small, bronze, one-eared goat from the time of Darius the Great. The goat's name is Hugo.

Arthur Upham Pope seems healthy but no company will insure him. He travels everywhere by airplane, writes scathing letters to airline officials on the difficulty of typing or studying in their planes. In Persia he is intimate with the Shah, risks his life almost daily photographing mosques and sacred tombs.* Last April Archeologist Pope decided that what the U. S. needed was an American Institute for Persian Art & Archeology, to do learned digging in Per sia, provide scholarships, publish mono graphs. In a few weeks he had dazzled such tycoons and pundits as Mortimer Leo Schiff, Professor Arthur Kingsley, Dr. William R. Valentiner, Percy R. Pyne Jr., Frank Crowninshield, George Dwight Pratt, into accepting posts on the board of directors. Then he left for London with the Institute half organized.

To convince the Royal Academy of the desirability of a Persian exhibition was child's play. Maintenance of friendly relations with Persia and Afghanistan are vital to Britain's defense of India. Persia has added British importance as the site of enormously rich British-controlled oil fields.

It was also in New York that Mr. Pope achieved his most remarkable coup. He had already been promised as loans to the Burlington House show $6,000,000 worth of objects from U. S. museums, dealers, private collections. Somebody had to pay the insurance and shipping costs on museum and private loans to London and back again, and the American Institute for P. A. & A. had no funds. One of the hard est-headed dealers in the world is Sir Joseph Duveen, Bart. Persian art is entirely outside his field, all he had to offer the exhibition was one carpet, mate to the Victoria & Albert Museum's Ardebil carpet, though inferior to it in quality.

Yet when Arthur Upham Pope inspired the British committee to ask, Sir Joseph paid the freight.

* In 1924 the U. S. Vice Consul in Teheran was killed by a mob for ill-advisedly photo graphing a sacred fountain. The U. S. Government collected $170,000 indemnity.

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