What Dimes Will Buy

Washington's National Gallery celebrated its tenth anniversary last week with a stunning exhibition of the latest art works acquired by the Croesus-rich Samuel H. Kress Foundation. In the last five years, the foundation, financed by dime-store profits, has bought 116 paintings, 18 sculptures and more than 1,300 miniature bronzes. A few of them will eventually be parceled out to museums as far away as Honolulu, but most will become part of the National Gallery's permanent collection.

Certain to stay are such masterpieces as the circular Adoration of the Magi (see picture), which was begun by the great and devout 15th Century Florentine, Fra Angelico, and finished by his more worldly junior, Fra Filippo Lippi. Renaissance Scholar Bernard Berenson surmises that Fra Angelico painted the radiant Virgin and Child and the background figures, and that Fra Filippo is responsible for the sharply characterized foreground figures on the right. Other standouts in the collection are Benozzo Gozzoli's Dance of Salome and Beheading of St. John the Baptist, a grisaille (grey monochrome) frieze by Giovanni Bellini, portraits by Mantegna, Titian and Tintoretto, no less than five Tiepolos, two Duerers, two Chardins, two Ingres, and two Poussins, including the coolly constructed Holy Family on the Steps.

The new gifts, added to the magnificent earlier ones of Andrew Mellon, Joseph Widener, Chester Dale, Lessing Rosenwald and the Kress Foundation, make the National Gallery a giant at ten

The Gallery plays host to some 2,000,000 visitors a year. New York Times Critic Aline Louchheim recently dropped by to see what sort the visitors were. "During a five-minute period one morning," she reported, "I spoke with a member of the Chilean consulate in New York, a middle-aged couple from Colorado, two art students from Chicago, a schoolteacher from Kentucky,an Arlington housewife dressed, like her three children, in sweater, slacks and sneakers, and a man from Economic Stabilization who said he'd come 'to get some damned peace and quiet.'"

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