In his first public one-man show, Painter Winston Churchill last week scored a smash hit. On the day the show opened in Kansas City, Mo., 5,427 people* crowded into the Nelson Gallery of Art, setting a new one-day record. By the time the Kansas City showing closes this week, some 20,000 will have seen Sir Winston's impressionist-style canvases, ranging from a wartime scene of Flanders' "Plug Street" (Ploegsteert, Belgium, as translated by World War I Tommies), painted in 1916, down to last year's landscape of the French Riviera seen from Villa La Pausa.
Behind the scenes, the Churchill exhibition had set off...