Academy at Home

Oldest and most select club of U.S. artists (328 members) is the National Academy of Design. This week, aged 116, the National Academy opened a new home, its first permanent quarters in over 40 years. The new Academy, gift of shy Millionaire Archer M. Huntington, who, with his family, has probably founded more museums (13) than any other private citizen in the U.S., consists of two classical greystone Fifth Avenue mansions, spliced together with elevators and other modern fixings.

As a housewarming for its new museum, the National Academy ransacked the 2,000 art works, good and bad, it had accumulated during the past 116 years, picked some 300 and this week put on a retrospective exhibition. Dignified portraits of N.A.s, received as initiation fees, ornamented the museum's classical walls, went back as far as Portraitist Samuel F. B. Morse, who invented the telegraph in the interim between two terms as the Academy's president.

Started in 1826 by Inventor Morse and a group of painter friends in protest against the poetry readings and discussions of landscape gardening that went on at the American Academy of Arts, the National Academy grew more sedate as it grew older. Artistic radicals rebel against its standards, meekly join if they are asked. Today in the select roster of its membership Luigi Lucioni, Eugene Speicher, Guy Pene du Bois, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh rank with Gilbert Stuart, George Inness, Winslow Homer, Albert P. Ryder, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent. (Grant Wood and Thomas Benton have never been invited; neither was James McNeill Whistler.)

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