Art at Andover

To Andover, Mass., last week went many a friend and patron of Phillips Academy to see a unique preparatory school art collection: Andover's Addison Gallery of American Art, now installed in its new Georgian building. In the nine sky-lit gallery rooms are some 100 U. S. paintings valued at $1,500,000. Among them: three Winslow Homers, George Wesley Bellows' Anne in Purple Wrap and Dempsey-Firpo Fight (lithograph). James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Battersea Bridge, works of Abbott Thayer, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, Arthur B. Davies, Julian Alden Weir, John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Frank Weston Benson, and many another modern; Early American works by Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, Benjamin West. There are six rooms for permanent and loan exhibitions of contemporary works. U. S. ship models, silver, glass, etchings and prints. In the basement are studios, work rooms, a library.* Andover chooses to call the donor of its gallery "anonymous." But most people are sure it was given by Morgan Partner Thomas Cochran, patron and alumnus of Andover and Yale. Headed by Architect Charles Adams Platt who designed the building, the Art Committee includes Mr. Cochran and his good friend Mrs. Cornelius Newton (Zaidee Cobb) Bliss. Because he first became interested in art through the efforts of Mrs. Bliss and her sister-in-law, the late Lizzie P. Bliss, Mr. Cochran is believed to have given the gallery as a memorial to Mrs. Keturah Addison Cobb, mother of Mrs. Bliss. Curator is Charles H. Sawyer. Most of the Gallery's choice paintings were selected by Robert G. Mclntyre of Macbeth Galleries and Miss Bliss (whose private collection was inherited by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art--see p. 29). Morgan Partner Cochran played football at Andover (1890) and Yale (1894). Returning later to Andover for a commencement reunion, he found it again to his liking, went back to Wall Street to establish a pool from which the school has received some $11,000,000 in anonymous donations. Other notable gifts: A bronze sculpture by Paul Manship (The Cycle of Life}; a fund to increase professorial salaries and insure sabbatical years for Andover's older teachers; $1,000,000 for keeping the campus trees and shrubs in order. A Cochran theory: Anyone who likes Nature will never become a Bolshevist.

* Fewer paintings than Andover but a more pretentious art school has the Cranbrook Foundation in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., endowed with $15,000,000 by Publisher George Booth of the Detroit News.

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