No love is lost between other Philadelphia art authorities and Dr. Albert Coombs Barnes, inventor of Argyrol, collector and self-appointed gadfly to museums. Last November Dr. Barnes broke a short truce with a bitter horselaugh at Millionaire Joseph Widener for buying, and at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art for accepting, a large, sparse Cézanne which he called inferior (TIME, Nov. 29). Lately the wealthy doctor has formed a queer alliance with the Philadelphia Artists' Union to discomfit attractive Mary Curran, State director of the Federal Art Project.
Last fortnight Miss Curran and the Pennsylvania Museum's Director Fiske Kimball arranged a big exhibition of WPA art, the first time Philadelphia's Relief artists have had a decent chance to show their work under public auspices. The Philadelphia Record's Dorothy Grafly, ablest art critic in the city, previewed the show and reported that "the general level is higher than that displayed in many a non-relief exhibition." What, therefore, was the surprise of Philadelphians converging on the museum that afternoon to find 60 pickets from the Artists' Union and from the Barnes Foundation at Merion, Pa. plodding grimly before the various entrances. Their signs proclaimed that "New York has 36 WPA art exhibits in one week —Philadelphia only ten in a year." That evening the dynamic doctor got the jump on reporters by suggesting that they, too, picket the museum and the Art Project "in protest against the Fascistic way it is being operated." When he heard this, Director Kimball relaxed his dignified silence for the first time to say that "Argyrol" Barnes's complaints were a lot of rubbish.
Last week the Doctor's rubbish burst into flame when he cried to a meeting of Philadelphia's Leftist People's Forum: "If you are really interested in painting go out and raise hell at the museum. ... If the time ever comes when we can lead ? mob maybe we can take it away from them."
Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which has in the past bridled at the sound of the Barnes tom-toms, was quietly preparing its 133rd annual exhibition of U. S. art. At the other end of the parkway from the museum, the academy last week remained equally remote from the attentions of Dr. Barnes and the Artists' Union. First visitors to the exhibition, however, thought that past criticisms from both sources had perhaps stimulated the academy's most vivid and inclusive show in years.
A smart innovation by Jury Chairman James Chapin was the grouping in separate galleries of conventional commissioned portraits and of the paintings submitted by jury members and faculty members. Notable among the 308 paintings displayed were Bathers' Picnic, a group of big, pink women in breezy undress by Jon Corbino; Sheldon Street, a Utrillo-like landscape by Francis Speight; The Mirage, an industrial waterfront with wild smoke reflections by Ernest Fiene; Charlie Ervine, a Maine portrait by Andrew Wyeth (TIME, Nov. 15). Awards: for the best picture painted in oil, to Eugene Speicher for Marianna; for the best portrait, to Arnold Blanch for Portrait of a Man; for the best landscape, to Philadelphia's gifted Antonio P. Martino for Leverington Avenue.