Southern California, scene of the mighty creative labors of Screenland, is not notable for cultivation of the more modest arts and crafts. Walter Conrad Arensberg, one of the quietest and most discriminating U. S. collectors of modern art, has said that in Hollywood he enjoys the most perfect vacuum America can produce. A symbol of this condition has long been the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art. Supported by the County of Los Angeles, it has boasted a beautiful lawn, a superb collection of fossils, and, since the last one was fired early in Depression, no art curator at all.
Last winter critics of all this, principally the Los Angeles Times' able art reviewer Arthur Millier, were joined by Los Angelenos who beheld the glories of art in San Francisco and were abashed. In February Los Angeles County responded by snagging, as its new art curator, Roland McKinney, the serious, easy-mannered young man who combed America for the San Francisco Fair's big show of contemporary paintings (TIME, March 6). Roland McKinney has great repute among museum directors because of his work at the Baltimore Museum from 1929 to October 1937. A strong believer in the Federal Art Project, he thinks "we are about ready to go over the top toward something approaching the high Renaissance."Over the previous Los Angeles top went Roland McKinney last week with his first exhibition at the Museum of History, Science and Art. Recognizing right off the bat the most lively art of the neighborhood he devoted the whole exhibition to work done on the Southern California Art Project. Under the direction of S. (for Stanton) MacDonald-Wright,* the project has concentrated on outdoor murals befitting the climate. On view were striking murals in many mediums, notably mosaic, petrachrome (dyed concrete in which are mixed little stones of varied color), and terra cotta slabs in low relief (an early Mesopotamian medium in which no serious work has been done for 2,500 years).
Da Vinci Discoveries
Italy's great exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci material at Milan this summer (TIME, May 29) put a wild thought in the head of a visitor named Carlo Noya. Signor Noya went home to the coastal town of Savona. He had an old picture at home and to him it looked strangely like some of the Leonardos he had seen. He fetched it to Milan, showed it to such experts as Adolfo Venturi. It did not take the experts long to know it for the work of "a great Tuscan master of the Renaissance." nor much longer to announce last week that it will be hung in the da Vinci exhibition as, in all probability, the master's long-lost and long-sought Madonna with the Cat.