Winging Away

What U.S. museum would reckon its growth by acreage? Manhattan's Metropolitan, of course. Two months from now it will have expanded or renovated its precincts by 14 acres, an addition of 41% more gallery space. Last week, in celebration, the Met unveiled two new splendors that are not for hanging.

While 6,500 members queued up to sip interprandial Scotch and sup on cafeteria boeuf bourguignon, Director James J. Rorimer showed off a colonnaded Spanish Renaissance patio, donated by the late, former Met president George Blumenthal, and the new Thomas J. Watson library, whose 155,000 volumes make it the largest art-literature stack in the Western Hemisphere. Topping off his week, Rorimer received the city's Medallion of Honor from Mayor Wagner.

The museum's attendance--45,000 on Sunday alone--might be honor enough, but Rorimer, nearing his tenth anniversary as director, is far from finished with his dreaming. Last week's fete will hardly be the Met's last supper. He announced plans for a $4,000,000 wing for American art. Not normally known as well-established in art of the New World, the Met has just a few things begging to find wall space there. Among its U.S. painting treasures, rarely seen together for lack of gallery space, are 37 Sargents, 22 Gilbert Stuarts, 15 Homers, eleven Copleys, eight Cassatts, seven paintings each by Eakins, Childe Hassam, Ryder, Benjamin West and Whistler, six each by Thomas Cole, Arthur Dove and the Peale brothers, five each by George Bellows, Albert Bierstadt and John Sloan.

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