Lovely Ladies

Many and varied are Manhattan's 16 museums, ranging from the stately Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Natural History Museum to the more modest collections of the American Numismatic Society and the Museum of the Peaceful Arts. With little advance publicity and less inaugural fuss, yet another Manhattan museum opened last week. Its name: The Museum of French Art. Its location: the handsome French Institute Building, No. 22 East 60th St. Its donors: Mr. & Mrs. Chester Dale, famed and fervent collectors of modern art.

Despite its name and an imposing grey sandstone exterior, the French Institute in the U. S. building contains neither the French consulate, the French Government tourist bureau nor the offices of the French commercial attache. It is a private organization to further French culture in the U. S., contains a lecture hall, reference library and a number of beautifully decorated, little-used "state apartments." The Dales felt that an excellent way of attracting public interest to the organization would be the establishment of a permanent gallery of French Art. They provided the money, supervised the remodeling of a suite of rooms, organized the Museum's first public exhibition: Portraits of Women: Romanticism to Surrealism.

Mrs. Chester Dale, Maud to the world of art, is the small, tawny-haired, vivacious daughter of Artist Frank Murray, onetime dramatic editor of the New York Herald. She paints landscapes and murals, collects pictures, writes books about them. For the past two years a handsome series of yellow-bound quartos on Modern Art have been appearing over the colophon of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Maud Dale wrote two of these books, one on Picasso, one on Modigliani. Booksellers know that not Alfred Knopf but Maud Dale is paying the publication cost of the whole series.

Chester Dale is a stockbroker, member of the firm of W. C. Langley & Co. On the Floor his name is sometimes associated with that of M. J. ("Mike") Meehan, famed Radio specialist. Always interested in art, by 1923 the Dales were sufficiently affluent to begin collecting. They did it with a rush. After four years picture dealers and critics rated the Chester Dale collection as one of the four or five most important collections of modern art in the U. S. Antique dealers know that Mrs. Dale's collection of furniture and early American glass is nearly as good as her pictures. Chester Dale spent so much time and money in dealers' galleries that he has become a dealer himself. In 1928 he bought an interest in the Paris art firm of Georges Petit. As a collector-dealer Chester Dale has a stockbroker's memory, can astonish professionals by reciting instantly the market history of practically every important picture of the past 40 years.

Wise to the ways of dealers the Dales made several astute provisions in founding their French Museum. To prevent the ossification which creeps over many a museum's board, no one may be a trustee for a term longer than three years. To check commercialism, no living artist may give a one-man show in the pictures of no one pictures dealer or collector who known to deal in pictures may be shown exclusively.

A dozen collections and the Luxembourg Museum in Paris lent portraits of lovely ladies for the open show. Artists represented ranged from early Romantic Theodore Gericault. Courbet, Cabanel to ultramodern Marie Laurencin and Jean Lurc,at Lovely ladies painted included the Duchess of Rutland Russian Dancer Ida Rubenstein (by Leon Bakst) and Maud Dale thingly disguised as Mme D. by Jean Lurc,at.

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