Republicans in San Francisco

San Francisco last week saw an exhibition of French painting never before equaled in the U. S. Before the show came to rest on the walls of the M. H. De Young Memorial Museum, it had had its ups & downs.

Just before World War II, Rene Huyghe, head of the Louvre's department of painting, gathered together a huge exhibition of the art of the French Republic, from David to Picasso. Director Huyghe sent his exhibition to South America. Bushy-eyebrowed, German-born Walter Heil of San Francisco's M. H. De Young Memorial Museum heard about it, decided to get it to the U. S.

Crusty Director Heil, who had already made himself famous by gathering the bang-up art exhibitions of San Francisco's World's Fair, was noted in the U. S. art world for his determination. For a year he negotiated, first with Paris, then with the Vichy Government, guaranteed shipment costs, promised to keep the collection safe until the war was over. Last October he managed to get the pictures from Buenos Aires as far as New York, where they were promptly frozen as part of the assets of France. Stymied, Director Heil started sending letters to Congressmen, even to President Roosevelt. Last month a plea to Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau finally turned the trick, and Walter Heil got the pictures to San Francisco.

Most spectacular period in the art of painting since the Italian Renaissance is probably that of Republican France. For nearly 150 years French painting made Paris the art capital of the world. Touched off by the Revolution of 1789, modern French painting flared into world leadership with the severe classical portraits of Jacques Louis David. Its light burned steadily through half a dozen political and esthetic revolutions, produced or attracted nearly all the world's great artists, gleamed through a variety of lenses and prisms (Classicists, Romanticists, Realists, the Barbizon landscapists, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists). It was still sputtering lustily with the fireworks of surrealism and abstraction when, last June, Adolf Hitler marched on Paris and scattered its embers under the heels of Nazi boots.

San Franciscans, strolling through roomfuls of top-flight Delacroix, Corots, Daumiers, Gauguins, Cezannes, van Goghs, Matisses, Braques, Tanguys, recognized many famed pictures (Ingres' Turkish Bath, Millet's Shepherdess Tending her Flock, Gerard's Madame Recamier, Delacroix's Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi}. Meanwhile gallery directors all over the U. S. tumbled over themselves to negotiate with Director Heil for a loan of his big French show after San Francisco is through with it.

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