Gringo Success

The kind of traveling art show that does the U.S. a lot of good abroad was a smash hit last week in Mexico City. Government officials, university professors, art lovers and artists trooped through the ornate white marble Palacio de las Bellas Artes to see what a fledgling U.S. collector had put together in a few years. The viewers saw a handsome survey of 57 paintings and six sculptures covering 180 years of U.S. art, from a serene John Singleton Copley portrait, Mrs. Roger Morris, finished in 1772, to first modern works by Watercolorists Charles Burchfield and John Marin, Painters Charles Sheeler, Edward Hopper and Morris Graves.

Hard-Boiled Eggs. On hand to greet the visitors and deliver an explanatory lecture was the collection's proud assembler and owner, 31-year-old Detroit Industrialist Lawrence A. Fleischman, vice president of his family's Detroit carpet company, part owner of two TV stations and a rotary-press company. Born of poor Russian immigrant parents, Fleischman scraped through hard times, remembers when the family lived on nothing but hard-boiled eggs for days. As a youth he pitched in to help his father run a small linoleum store in Detroit. After the elder Fleischman nourished his shop into Detroit's largest carpet business, Larry, at 14, was sent to Western Military Academy in Alton, 111., got interested in art when a St. Louis Art Museum guard invited him into a gallery. He promptly bought a Picasso etching, The Three Graces. Four years later, while at Purdue, he bought his first Matisse drawing.

Fleischman's serious collecting began after service overseas in World War II as a combat infantryman. On the advice of his wife, a keen art student, he shifted his buying to American works, and now Fleischman has a handsome collection of Winslow Homer and John Marin watercolors. "What started out to be a hobby has become a disease," he admits.

Fast Conversion. A loan exhibit of Fleischman's collection at the University of Michigan last winter attracted U.S. Information Agency officials. They asked Fleischman to make it a traveling exhibit. Says Fleischman: "I felt it was time the Latin Americans had a glimpse of North American art. I came along myself because I wanted to see, to be a part of it all."

Fleischman and wife Barbara lost no time in wading in, are now sopping up Mexican culture, have started buying Mexican art, and have struck up an acquaintance with Artist Rufino Tamayo. In his way, Collector Fleischman is proving to be almost as good propaganda as his collection. He will travel with it to nine other Latin American countries in the next 20 months.

Controversy over what artists the U.S. should exhibit abroad flared up anew last week, thanks to a couple of spark-breathing art journals. The monthly Arts addressed an open letter of protest to President Eisenhower because of USIA's cancellation of an exhibit including works of ten artists criticized as politically left wing. The larger Art News joined in with a blast against USIA's censoring and canceling of traveling exhibits because of the political pasts of some of the artists involved, but charged incorrectly that the Government had instituted a policy restricting the exhibits to paintings made before 1917, date of the Bolshevik revolution.

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