Biggest Show

Five days before Chicago's 1933 World's Fair was to open, Chicagoans trooped to the Art Institute, a mile up Michigan Avenue from the Fair grounds. There they saw the biggest, most comprehensive, most valuable loan exhibition ever assembled in the U. S. The fact that the show was set in the fireproof Institute instead of in a temporary building at the Fair proper enabled its sponsors to borrow $75,000,000 worth of paintings and sculpture. All the borrowed pictures hanging last week had come from U. S. museums (31) and private collections (more than 200). Yet to come was the one exception: James McNeill Whistler's famed Portrait of My Mother, valued at $1,000,000, France's one contribution to the Fair, lent by the Louvre through Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. When it arrives in Chicago next week, U. S. troops will escort it from Union Station to the Institute.

Director Robert Batholow Harshe of the Institute cleverly arranged the show along the galleries of the second floor as a "miniature history of art." Plain to see last week was the centuries' meandering sequence of styles in painting, each example a world-famed masterpiece. And Director Harshe headlined the show's "ten most significant" pictures: Hans Holbein's Portrait of Catherine Howard from Toledo's Museum of Art; Tiziano Vicellio's (Titian) Venus and the Lute Player from Manhattan's Duveen Bros.; Domenico Theotocopuli's (El Greco) The Assumption of the Virgin from Chicago's own Art Institute; Frans Hals's The Merry Lute Player from Mrs. John R. Thompson & John R. Thompson Jr. (Chicago); Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez' Isabella, First Queen of Philip IV of Spain from Philanthropist Max Epstein of Chicago; Rembrandt Harmens van Rijn's Aristotle with the Bust of Homer from Duveen Bros.; Gustave Courbet's La Toilette de, la Mariee from Smith College: Whistler's Portrait of My Mother; Auguste Renoir's The Canoeists' Breakfast from Phillips Memorial Gallery (Washington. D. C.); George Seurat's Un Dimanche `a la Grande Jatte from the Art Institute.

Not visible last week was six years' work that made the show possible. In 1927 Fair President Rufus Cutler Dawes appointed Chauncey McCormick chairman of the committee on art exhibits. The Fair's general manager, Maj. Lenox Riley Lohr, wanted to know what Chicagoans wanted to see. A questionnaire showed they wanted to see September Morn and Rosa Bonheur's The Horse Fair. Mr. McCormick, remembering the art shambles at Chicago's 1893 Fair where every exhibitor was given space to hang what he liked, countered with the names of Rembrandt, Gauguin, da Vinci, et al.

Lohr: People won't be interested in a lot of dead men.

McCormick: Did you know that Rosa Bonheur was dead? Do you know who painted September Morn?

Lohr: No.*

McCormick: Exactly. But at least you know that Rembrandt, Gauguin and da Vinci are dead.

Little, jolly Director Harshe went 10 work and charted all the star paintings owned in the U. S. Then, with Chairman McCormick and husky, bespectacled Associate Curator Daniel Catton Rich, he set out to write, visit, badger and plead with the owners. To Collector Joseph E. Widener, who never lends pictures from his famed collection, went Mr. McCormick to get three pictures: Vermeer's A Woman Weighing Gold, Lorenzo di Credi's Self Portrait and Neroccio di Bartolomeo's Portrait of a Woman. Mr. Widener balked at setting a precedent for other borrowers. Mr. McCormick countered with a promise to send a private car for the three pictures, entitle Mr. Widener to say to other borrowers. "Can you send a private car too?" Then Mr. McCormick went to Washington's Smithsonian Institution for Guardi's Ruins With Figures, given by Mrs. Marshall Langdon. He met a stone wall of refusal. He went to Mrs. Langdon, who told the Smithsonian to lend the picture if they wanted her to will them the rest of her collection.

Other lenders: Andrew W. Mellon, Mrs. William R. Timken (roller bearings), Mrs. Payne Whitney and her son John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, Circus Man John Ringling, Editor Frank Crowninshield, New York's Governor Herbert Henry Lehman, John D. Rockefeller, Film Director Josef von Sternberg, Automobile Man John North Willys.

Non-lenders: The collections of the late Henry Edwards Huntington (Pasadena); the late Henry Clay Frick; and John P. Morgan who has a flat rule against lending.

The Institute has raised the number of its guards from 32 to 60. After last fortnight's Brooklyn Museum robbery (TIME, May 15), the Chicagoans decided to recruit police dogs to smell out hidden interlopers after closing time.

*September Morn was done by French Painter Paul Chabas, now 64.

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