Little Louvre

At the New York World's Fair, where ten minutes apiece suffice for a shining view of anything from milking a cow to the World of Tomorrow (see p. 10), visitors last week inspected a new panorama in 25 neat stages. In value per square foot it topped all other exhibits at the Fair; in cultural merit it was one of the few at which none could carp. It consisted of 400 paintings by the finest masters who worked in Europe between 1300 and 1800 A.D.

Not a Fair corporation enterprise, this little Louvre advertised nothing but the public spirit of a few rich sponsors and the taste of the man who assembled it, the Detroit Museum's grey, spare, spry Director Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner. Twice as big as the Old Masters exhibition at the San Francisco Exposition (TIME, March 6), it covered every major school of European art up to the French Revolution. It was remarkable also in that no less than 88 works were being shown publicly for the first time in the U. S. Lent by great foreign museums or private and inaccessible collections, these could not have been seen otherwise by nine-tenths of the visitors.

"I believe it is the most sacred and precious spot at the Fair," cried New York's Mayor LaGuardia at the opening. Precious to the tune of $30,000,000 in insurance, the paintings were hung in a windowless concrete and steel building, thorny with burglar alarms, guarded day & night by a Pinkerton detective in each of the 25 rooms. But because no grandeurs were attempted and most of the pictures were small. World's Fair trippers could get through the show on their first legs rather than their last.

Dr. Valentiner went too far with intimate arrangement only once, crowding five El Grecos into a cubicle. Chief triumphs of the show were in his own favorite field of Flemish and Dutch painting. In the eyes of connoisseurs, the Ince Hall Madonna (see cut) by Jan van Eyck was worth an exhibition all by itself. This tiny (8 3/4 inches by 6 inches) painting on wood came all the way from the National Gallery in Melbourne, Australia, where it is valued at $250,000. Until 1922 it lurked, under a heavy scum of varnish, in the murk of Ince Hall, near Liverpool. When the Australian gallery bought and cleaned it, English art-lovers cried aloud to see it lost to the Antipodes. So infinite in detail and so opulent are the Madonna's cascaded red robe, blue tunic and gold embroidered background that the painting seems less a miniature than a heroic picture seen through a small window.

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