Crush & Culture

At a presidential preview, Harry Truman had dropped in and sounded a happy blast on a 12th Century hunting horn. Last week, as Washington's National Gallery admitted ordinary visitors to its showing of the family treasures of Austria's Habsburgs, there were plenty of such rich and marvelous knickknacks for folks to goggle at. including jeweled goblets, an emerald cream jar, embossed parade armor, even a nine-lb. golden salt cellar wrought by Benvenuto Cellini. But the finest treasures of all in the $80,000,000 loan exhibition had been put together with only a few dollars worth of paint and canvas. Among them were seven Tintorettos, twelve Titians, nine Rubenses, six Velasquezes, Duerer's big, bloody Martyrdom of the 10,000 Christians and Vermeer's marble-cool masterpiece, The Artist in His Studio.

Charles V, Habsburg Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, once picked up a paintbrush Titian had dropped and handed it to him with the words, "Titian deserves to be served by Caesar." The female magnificence of Titian's Danae and the male craftiness of his Pope Paul III in last week's show confirmed the emperor's judgment. Philip IV, Habsburg King of Spain, had patronized Diego Velasquez, whose pictures of the king's little daughter, the stiffly costumed Infanta Margareta Teresa, were among the most brilliant and humanly pathetic portraits ever painted.

After six centuries of growth, the Habsburg collection was appropriated in 1918 by the Austrian Republic. Stored in salt mines during World War II, it was recovered by General Patton's Third Army, and sent on a triumphal tour of Europe and the U.S. by liberated Austria. For the transatlantic crossing, the collection was packed into the hold of a refrigerated Navy supply ship (hold temperature 65DEG).

In February the show will move from Washington to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum, spend two months there and two months each in Chicago's Art Institute and San Francisco's De Young Museum before its return to Vienna.

Judging by what happened in Washington, it may well break the 2,500,000 attendance record set by last year's traveling exhibition of masterpieces from the Berlin Museum. The opening day's crush made even Manhattan's gum-cracking Daily News sit up and take notice.

"We hear a good deal from double-domes," editorialized the News, "about how Americans are uncultured, semiliterate boors [yet] to this show, which didn't open until 3:00 p.m., came 41,725 persons [in] one day . . . Just what do our cultured detractors here and elsewhere make of that?"

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