Change at the National Gallery

Until 1938, the capital of the world's richest nation had no art museum worthy of the name. In that year Financier Andrew Mellon gave the Government his $50 million art collection and added another $16 million to build a museum to house it. Today the National Gallery is one of the world's great collections, and, in large measure, the man who has guided its growth and controlled its quality is Director John Walker, 62, who last week announced his retirement.

A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, Walker prepared for the job by studying for three years with the legendary Bernard Berenson in Italy. He helped "B.B." to prepare his definitive Italian Painters of the Renaissance, a background that proved invaluable when he joined the new National Gallery as curator at its founding under then Director David Edward Finley. When Samuel H. Kress, Chester Dale and others offered their collections to the new gallery, it fell to Walker to make selections from them and to authenticate debated pictures. Walker became director himself in 1956; during his term, he almost doubled the gallery's holdings, acquiring 899 new paintings. His single greatest coup was the U.S.'s first Leonardo da Vinci, the $5,000,000 Ginevra del Bend.

As his successor, the National Gallery's trustees named the candidate that Walker had groomed for the job, J. (for John) Carter Brown, the gallery's second in command since 1961. At 34, he becomes the youngest director of a major museum in the U.S. Scion of the rich Rhode Island Browns (his grandfather founded Brown University and his parents are both well-known collectors), the new director is also a Harvard man and latter-day student of Berenson's. During the past two years, he has been principally concerned with plans for the National Gallery's most ambitious new project: the $20 million Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, a sort of esthetic equivalent to the science-oriented School for Advanced Study at Princeton.

A cheerfully social Washington bachelor, Brown may well liven up some of the National Gallery's stuffier formal functions, and possibly even encourage the purchase of more contemporary paintings. But his prime concern, he said last week, was to deepen "our commitment to scholarship" by bringing to the new study center the "great minds in art research from all over the world."

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