Hexagons Under the Sun

Geometry in the form of polygons is also the rule for Puerto Rico's only art museum. The island commonwealth, famed for frolic, sun and sugar, last week celebrated the opening of a $2,000,000 museum in Ponce, designed by Edward Durell Stone and almost entirely bankrolled by Industrialist Luis Ferre, who is a three-time loser in the island's gubernatorial elections. Seven skylighted interior galleries are hexagonal, juxtaposing art works that can be scanned in a single twirl.

On its cloth-coated walls, the new museum displays Ferre's 400-work, $3,000,000 collection. There are paintings by Velasquez, Gainsborough, Reynolds and Vandyke, but Ferre preferred gems to giants--and purchased excellent examples of pre-Raphaelite and Italian baroque painters long held unfashionable. "We have minor masters rather than poor paintings by the big masters," he says. But the museum is not intended only as a repository. To stimulate Puerto Rican art, there are exhibited 150 paintings made on the island itself.

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