Wisconsin Gift

When Joseph Edward Davies was Ambassador to Russia, Embassy living quarters in Moscow gradually filled up with Russian paintings. An art-loving Embassy clerk who had been stalking a painting for six months, saving up money to buy it, eventually found it hanging in one of the Davies' 13 bathrooms. Last week, if the clerk happened to be in Madison, Wis., he would have searched for it in more public quarters on the University of Wisconsin campus. The gift of Ambassador Davies to his alma mater last year (TIME, May 31, 1937), it formed part of a collection of 122 pre-revolutionary and contemporary paintings and rare 18th to 18th-Century icons taken out of Russia after elaborate negotiations, insured for a reputed sum of $100,000 and called priceless. Visitors to the first public showing in the U. S. found the 96 paintings prime examples of colorful, realistic, popular art, ranging from Klavdii Labedev's classic The Fall of Novgorod, to almost photographic scenes of factory and peasant life by Soviet artists. Watching the reaction of Wisconsin students, Professor Oskar Frank L. Hagen, curator of the university's paintings, said they were "flabbergasted and enraptured with pleasure."

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