Art Comes to Palm Beach

One of the biggest, heaviest pieces of sculpture on sale in the U.S. last week was bought by a museum with a name so new that no one seemed to know it. The Norton Gallery and School of Art in West Palm Beach (Fla.) paid $10,000 for the yellow, 1,000-pound Youth, by William Zorach. The man who signed the check, and who has signed all the checks so far for Florida's newest palace of culture, was a spare, 65-year-old, fiddle-playing Chicago tycoon (Acme Steel), Ralph H. Norton.

It was Ralph Norton who decided that what West Palm Beach needed was an art museum. He first visited the town in 1898, when it sported only two resort hotels. Whenever his job permitted, he came again, watched the town burgeon. In 1935 he bought a home there. When at last he and his wife decided that their picture collection had outgrown their Chicago house, he knew exactly what to do about it. Late last winter his smart, low, $250,000 museum stood completed in West Palm Beach--bounded on one end by the Dixie Highway, on the other by the road from Miami. Says Norton: "It is just the right kind of place for such an institution. Results since the gallery opened confirm our belief. Lots of lookers."

Donor Norton is pretty well satisfied with the 145 paintings he gave the museum: he and his wife spent 20 years collecting them. Sixty are by contemporary U.S. artists--Robert Brackman, Eugene Speicher, Leon Kroll, Maurice Sterne, Robert Philipp, Jerry Farnsworth. Earlier U.S. artists like Inness, Whistler, Frederick Waugh, Elliott Daingerfield, are represented. English portraitists, a few illustrative old and French Impressionist masters help round out the collection.

With last week's purchase of the bulky Zorach, plus six other American sculptures, adding up to a total of 17 pieces, Donor Norton felt he had done his bit for the museum's sculpture. He still cocks a collector's eye at new pictures: a good new American can even lure him out of his summer fastness at Chautauqua, N.Y., where he has sailed his boats and presided over the Board of Trustees since 1937.

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