Closed Doors

The U.S. art world last week reverberated to the angry slamming of closed doors:

P: In Milwaukee, Art Institute Director LaVera Pohl, 54, handed the museum trustees her resignation after four years in office. Reasons: 1) the museum's major fund raiser, Gimbel Vice President Charles Zadok, had accused her of being "a compromiser" on contemporary art, i.e., not showing enough of it; 2) wealthy Board President Alfred U. Elser had made "the insulting and farcical request" that she start looking for a replacement for herself. Bristling with indignation, Director

Pohl, herself a wealthy Milwaukee socialite, defended her choice of broadly popular shows as a civic duty, proudly pointed to annual attendance figures (up from 27,000, when she took over, to 50,000 in 1954). Said she: "In other words, it is a matter of 'the Moor has done his duty, and now may go.' " By voice vote, the trustees agreed that Director LaVera Pohl now may go.

P: In Dallas, the 450 women members of the Public Affairs Luncheon Club racked up a thumping victory in their campaign to censor the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts for 1) "the presentation of the art and concepts of Communists" (seven artists were named, including Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso), and 2) "a tendency to overemphasize all phases of futuristic, modernistic and nonobjective paintings and statuary." In the face of a rising wave of protest from such art-conscious Texas citizens as the Dallas Pro-America group, the Southern Memorial Association (dedicated to preserving the traditions of the Old South), the Matheon Club and four Dallas art clubs, the museum's millionaire-studded board restated museum policy in an open letter to Dallas' Metropolitan American Legion Post. The policy: not to "acquire or exhibit any work which is designed to convey Communist propaganda . . . nor knowingly to acquire or exhibit the work of a person known by us to be now a Communist or of Communist-front affiliation."

P: In Chicago, the faculty and students of the 18-year-old Institute of Design made common cause toward an unusual end: to keep the door closed against its newly designated director, Jay Doblin. 35, top Raymond Loewy designer, named to take over the school next September. The institute, founded in 1937 by the late Hungarian Artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, has long prided itself on following the advanced experimental pattern set by Germany's famed Bauhaus group started by Architect Walter Gropius. Director-designate Doblin, attempting to quell the faculty revolt, pointed out that enrollment was off, costs running ten times student tuitions, and promised to put the school in closer association with industry. But from the faculty, to whom Doblin's appointment represents the ascendancy of the "chrome strip" school of design (souping up the exterior, leaving the interior basically unchanged), the answer was, "Never." In a near unanimous appeal, they asked immediate reconsideration of Doblin's appointment: "The designer must be more than a stylist or decorator who caters to fashionable or opportunistic needs."

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