Philadelphia Program

An old gentleman with a long white beard and brown dressing gown, dropping a festoon of red paper on a plaster foot and a jumble of wire, was stopping the sidewalk traffic on Philadelphia's busy Chestnut Street last week. He was in a window of Blum's department store, and across the street in Wanamaker's windows were some equally strange displays. Philadelphia's radio station KYW broadcast two haywire programs called "Love on Wheels" and "Love is a Dream," and Philadelphia's newspapers were filled with angry letters-to-the-editor. The answer was that Surrealism had come to Philadelphia. At the Pennsylvania Museum of Art was the most newsworthy exhibition it has ever had, the traveling show of Surrealist Art organized by New York's Museum of Modern Art (TIME, Dec. 14).

The Museum's president, canny John Stogdell ("Stog") Stokes, had staged his act with great skill. With thousands of Philadelphians who had never been near his imposing yellow limestone building sweeping through the doors, now vas his moment to launch a drive he had long been planning: a campaign to raise $15,500,000 for his institution in the next ten years.

President Stokes is not only one of the most important but one of the shrewdest museum presidents in the U. S. An oldline Quaker, independently wealthy, his personal hobby is collecting Pennsylvania Dutch furniture and anecdotes. Friends say that for years he has carried on a private war with an old lady in Kansas who owns and refuses to sell a rare Windsor chair that matches one in his home. His favorite story is of a rival collector who bargained skillfully with a farmer for a fine bedstead, lost it when the farmer's wife said: "We haven't made any sauerkraut this year, just five barrels in case of sickness." The collector laughed so uproariously the farmer refused to sell.

Under the presidency of "Stog" Stokes, the Pennsylvania Museum has equired a $20,000,000 building, topped with a huge pink terra cotta Zeus, and collections with an estimated value of between $10,000,000 and $15,000,000. Besides a very respectable list of Old Masters, it includes New York's beloved Madison Square Diana, and the finest collection of the works of Thomas Eakins in the U. S. But less than 20% of the interior of the tremendous

building is finished and available for exhibition space. Five-sixths of the museum's treasures are in its cellars, with no space to show them. Of his $15,500,000 fund, President Stokes intends to set aside two-thirds to finish the building, complete and endow its collections. The balance will endow the Museum's schools.

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