Pink Marble Gesture

When Teddy Roosevelt was trustbusting, Omaha's most grandiose mansion was Joslyn Castle. Daring schoolboys pressed their noses against the glass of its greenhouse for a peek at the Joslyn orchids. Their elders exclaimed over the turreted grey pile's pipe organ. But in local society, even organ and orchids could never quite let George Joslyn and his wife Sarah live down the rumor that their fortunes were founded on a quack cure for gonorrhea ("Big G"). The Joslyns went to Omaha in 1880 with $9 and two suitcases. In 1916 sharp-eyed George Joslyn left his wife an estate of $5,200,000, made mostly from the Western Newspaper Union (boilerplate insides for small-town papers).

Sarah Selleck Joslyn spent years planning a memorial for her husband, finally hit on a combined art gallery and concert hall which could house the beloved organ he had played with player rolls. After the $2,900,000 pink marble Joslyn Memorial was opened in 1931, she used to visit it and put player rolls on the organ herself. This winter, too feeble to venture out, she stayed bedridden in Joslyn Castle.

Only thing Nebraska had ever seen to rival Mrs. Joslyn's gift was a prairie sunset. But the Memorial's art had nearly all been bought in that happy era when money was good and taste was bad. Typical of its contents: a large, lush Bouguereau, Bonheur's Cattle and Landscape, a collection of Egyptian antiquities. Little of the $1,700,000 endowment Mrs. Joslyn gave it was spent on accessions.

Over at Lincoln, Nebraska's capital and seat of her university, the Nebraska Art Association sprouted a decade after the Joslyns blew into Omaha. Last week, to celebrate its 50th annual show, the Association's galleries (upstairs from the fossils in the Nebraska State Museum) were crammed to overflowing with a first rate loan exhibition of U. S. art and a selection of 50 paintings from its own permanent collection. Since 1928 the Association and the University of Nebraska (together spending some $5,000 a year) have bought from similar shows the work of Robert Henri, John Steuart Curry, Charles Sheeler, Grant Wood, Morris Kantor, Leon Kroll, Edward Hopper, William Glackens, Reginald Marsh, many another artist.

In its first five days last week, the Association's show drew 15,000 of Lincoln's 86,000 citizens. On the week's fourth day, 89-year-old Sarah Selleck Joslyn died in Joslyn Castle. Behind her, solid and pink, she left her marble gesture to the prairies, a reminder to other mortal Nebraskans not to be too proud.

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