The Well-Taylored Metropolitan

The keeper of Manhattan's massive Metropolitan Museum knew just what he wanted: $7,500,000. Last week the Met's chubby Director Francis Henry Taylor set out to get it. To open the Met's Diamond Jubilee building campaign (the Museum will be 75 next February), Taylor persuaded General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower to come to Manhattan to receive an honorary life fellowship in the Museum, because "through [his] wisdom and foresight many irreplaceable art treasures were saved."

Said General Ike, on his first visit to the Met since his cadet days: "Even the roughest soldiers feel more sympathy with ancient Egyptian art when they view a graceful column rising into the sky than from all the descriptive matter written on the subject." Said Director Taylor: "This is not an art museum in the ordinary sense. It is a visual library recording the whole history of civilization from ancient times to the present day."

No Hanging Gardens. Taylor had already elaborated on this thesis. In Babel's Tower (Columbia University Press; $1), he had written: "We in the art museums of America have reached a point where we must make a choice of becoming either temples of learning . . . or of remaining merely hanging gardens for the perpetuation of the Babylonian pleasures of aestheticism and the secret sins of private archaeology."

Fortnight ago Taylor dusted off the Met's Egyptian collection (second only to Cairo's), rearranged it in 15 galleries and a great hall to show, among other things, that the ancient Egyptians rolled their equivalent of dice, drank beer, plucked their eyebrows and went in for pedicures. The New York World-Telegram's Art Critic Emily Genauer tartly accused the Met of showing more interest in archaeology than in art.

Taylor is no archaeologist, but his vice director, Horace Howard Furness Jayne, once did a lot of digging in China. Both got their start in the Philadelphia Museum. Taylor went on to make the Worcester (Mass.) Art Museum one of the most active small-city galleries in the country. In 1940, when he was invited to take over the Met, he became the youngest (36) director in Met history.

Taylor's ambition is to "repackage the product" as five separate museums (of ancient art, oriental art, paintings, decorative art, early American art--TIME, Jan. 29, 1945). He hopes to make each section a chronologically sensible tour of history as well as of art.

No Bulging Cellars. Taylor and his trustees called in a professional fund-raising company, the John Price Jones agency, to help him raise the $7,500,000 he wants for improvements, assuring Jones of about 4% of the take. The Jones men, given office space among the plaster busts in a storeroom back of a medieval gallery, set out to bombard press and public with good reasons for helping the Met build. Among the best: 1) Taylor's showmanship (no admission fees, a junior museum, subway ads, fresh paint), has boosted annual attendance from about 1,000,000 in 1939, to over 1,800,000; 2) the Met now has some 500,000 art objects--many of them gathering dust in underground storerooms--and only 325,811 sq. ft. of display space.

The Met no longer accepts the dubious overflow of its trustees' attics. From now on the groaning queen of U.S. museums is willing to inherit nothing but the best, and wants no strings attached.

No Modern Burdens. Particularly, the Met does not wish to burden itself with European moderns, and is willing to leave the wisdom of its decision to history. According to Director Taylor, "a shallow, meaningless eclecticism has been . . . to a large extent the fashion of the past three generations." Traditionally, the Met has taken a cautious view of contemporary art: it possesses 27 Rembrandts and no Picassos. Its collection of 15th to 19th Century paintings is the most comprehensive on this side of the Atlantic.

To show how the Met had grown, Taylor last week put on an exhibition entitled "Taste of the '70s." It includes a few good things (notably Frans Hals's Malle Babbe--Crazy Barbara, the Witch of Haarlem), coachloads of coyly draped marbles and candy-box oils. Most popular picture, rescued from the cellar for the occasion, was Pierre Cot's frothy Storm. Judging by reproduction sales in its heyday, Storm came close to being the Met's most popular picture of all time.

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