Dodoes & Elephants

Do U.S. museums keep up with the times? And are the times worth keeping up with? Last week, at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, gallery-goers could see for themselves. Answers to both questions were on display: 64 paintings that U.S. museums had bought during the past two years.

Like a mail-order catalogue, the show had a little of everything--from the sharp literalness of an Edward Hopper Civil War scene, to a tangled, crisscross abstraction by Mark Tobey. There were the sanitary surfaces of Georgia O'Keeffe, the fluid mists of John Marin, a pasteboard street scene by Stuart Davis. A few canvases with less familiar trademarks made gallery-goers look twice: Joe Jones's "Departure" from a grim and desolate wasteland; Henry Koerner's tired old couple, huddled in a cart, gazing numbly at the ruin about them; Theodore Lux Feininger's old-fashioned engines, squatting eerily on old-fashioned tracks, like ghosts in the night.

Director Mitchell Wilder had put on his first "new accessions" show two years ago. "Some of the museums may have had the feeling that we wanted to exhibit their pictures and give them the haha. We had no such thought in mind and were very circumspect . . .

"Lots of museums buy pictures they don't really like. People can stand at an exhibition like this and argue all night on whether museum people are dodoes and filling their places with tommyrot . . . But museums don't buy pictures to live with. They buy pictures in the same way a zoo buys an elephant or a lion. They buy them for people to see. Who would want to live with an elephant?"

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