23 Years of Grace

In the crowded lecture hall of the San Francisco Museum of Art gathered a who's who of art, from black-tied sponsors to shaggy bohemians. The reception committee numbered 50 strong, ranged alphabetically from the Association of San Francisco Potters to the World Affairs Council. Sitting nervously on the stage, and at times close to tears, was the object of this outpouring of affection: durable, forthright Dr. Grace Louise McCann Morley, 57 (TIME, Feb. 28, 1955). Dr. Morley, the most respected woman museum director in the U.S., and the dominant spokesman for contemporary art on the West Coast, was retiring after 23 years as director of the San Francisco Museum.

In a sense, the two paintings and the one sculpture witnessing Dr. Morley's farewell party one night last week were symbols in miniature of her long career. The Diego Rivera harked back to the 1930s, when San Francisco artists were caught up in Diego's own on-the-spot enthusiasm for filling vast wall surfaces with frescoes. Symbolic of what she calls "the incredible years of 1947 to 1949, when this wave of something new swept over us," was the big Clyfford Still abstraction by the man who, along with Mark Rothko, sparked San Francisco's abstract art revival ("And don't think I wasn't baffled by them at first," she admits). Henry Moore's carved-wood Reclining Woman stood as symbol of her unceasing effort to bring the best of modern art to San Francisco, thus help bridge the gap that had tended to keep the West Coast ten to fifteen years behind trends set in Paris and Manhattan.

Behind her, Grace Morley is leaving a museum she has built up from scratch, and that now boasts a growing first-rate collection, an active membership of 4,400, an annual operating budget of $150,000. Says she, "I'm rather happy--my sense is of 'mission accomplished.' " As a farewell present, she will take with her four massive portfolios of art contributed by some 200 local painters, printmakers, watercolorists and sculptors whom she has long championed. Their admiration and affection is warmly returned by Grace Morley, who says firmly: "The Bay Area is one of the most creative centers of art in the U.S." To the degree that this is true, it is largely thanks to Grace.

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