Bonanza for Philadelphia

That landmark of modern art, Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, found its final resting place last week: the Philadelphia Museum. What's more, a prime version of another historymaker, Brancusi's abstract sculpture, Bird in Space, alighted in the same spot. These headliners were just a part of one of the most superb School-of-Paris collections ever made, the 1,000-item, $2,000,000 life-work of Walter Arensberg, 72, rich California scholar, and his wife Louise. Their collection, which fills their servantless Los Angeles house from floor to ceiling (and which includes pre-Columbian sculpture), will move to Philadelphia as soon as the museum readies 19 new rooms for it.

The Arensbergs bought fine works by almost every pioneer modern artist, but they cherish especially fervent views of Duchamp and Brancusi.*

Duchamp sold three-fourths of his output to them, and him they deem to be "the Giorgione of the 20th Century . . . He remains the unknown soldier of the war for modern art, perhaps because of the smallness of his output." Soldier Duchamp fought his last battle with a piece of canvas some 30 years ago, gave up painting to pursue a greater passion: chess. He has since (TIME, Oct. 31, 1949) become a fair player.

Brancusi, at 74, still labors in a Paris studio, squeezing out streamlined shapes that merely puzzle most people. To the unsympathetic eye, his Bird resembles a propeller blade, his Torso of a Young Man looks like a drainpipe, and his Sculpture for the Blind is strictly for the blind. Walter Arensberg has one of the most respectable explanations of Brancusi's work ever offered. Brancusi, he says, sculps what Plato had in mind by the idea of form: "Plato's 'idea' is the archetype from which the infinite forms of nature derive, and it is in that sense that the works of Brancusi relate to what they represent."

The Arensbergs thought of giving their collection to the Los Angeles County Museum, Stanford, U.C.L.A. and Harvard. The main trouble was space. This soon narrowed the possibilities to a few of the country's major museums.

Curator of Paintings Henry Clifford, whose Philadelphia Museum is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, looked happy as a cat that has swallowed a cubist canary. He called the Arensbergs' gift "possibly the most intense single grouping of 20th Century art ever made."

*They also cherish and promote the all-but-hopeless view that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.

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