Newark & Dana

Visitors to New York City this summer may banquet on fine art until they bust. The Metropolitan Museum has lavished its space, taste and scholarship on "Life in America" as artists have seen it through 200 years (TIME, May 8). The new, glassy Museum of Modern Art holds a festal exhibition of "Art in Our Time" (TIME, May 22). At the World of Tomorrow, 1,214 examples of "American Art Today" show contemporary ferment among U. S. artists; not far away are hung 400 serene successes by Old and still Older Masters (TIME, June 26). To assemble all this took the combined resources of a World's Fair and a big city.

Comparatively unsung across the Hudson, the Newark Museum last week completed its array of summer attractions. Reconstructed in its big, walled garden and restored to the last detail was a one room building of local sandstone, dated 1784--the oldest schoolhouse still standing in Newark. In the airy Museum itself were: 1) a full-scale reconstruction of a Tibetan lamasery altar; 2) fine lace and silverware; 3) "The Human Body & Its Care," an exhibit featuring a skeleton; 4) American "primitive'' paintings; 5) 200 electrically driven, slow-motion models showing all the physical principles used "in the art and science of mechanics'"; 6) a retrospective show of paintings by burly, grey-haired Joseph Stella, one of the first and most gifted "modern" U. S. artists.

To visiting professionals in the arts this catholic display had an interest which none of the big city shows could boast. It proved that the Newark Museum remains the seat of the most sensible program of small museumship yet formulated in the U. S. This program took shape 30 years ago when the Museum was created as an adjunct to the Newark Public Library by an extraordinary librarian, the late John Cotton Dana. Dana's fame as a museum director has spread farther and wider ever since.

A tall, salty Vermonter who just missed being a preacher, John Cotton Dana became a surveyor for his health, then took charge of the public libraries of Denver, Springfield, Mass, and Newark (beginning in 1902). He believed in making books useful. He started the first children's library in the U. S., the first business branch libraries, the first extensive public files of periodicals and newspapers. On the fourth floor at Newark he set aside two rooms and a corridor for Art; in 1909 it was incorporated as a museum and received $10,000 from the town to buy an Oriental collection. Director Dana wrote a little piece called The Museum of Interest and the Museum of Awe. Said he:

"If a museum does not care to be of immediate practical use to the people who maintain it, help them to more intelligent enjoyment of daily life by adding interest to the common interest of that life, and seeks only to arouse astonishment, awe, and a harmful reverence by means of objects rare, old. costly, and of aristocratic history, it needs only acquire such objects, place them on walls or pose them in cases, speak with seeming authority of Art, Beauty, Esthetics, Styles, Periods, and the like, and rest content."

So the Newark Museum was chartered not for awesome Art alone but also for the exhibition of works of science, history and technology. Newark was an industrial city and a satellite of Manhattan; its upper class even then was beginning to find homes in the country and entertainment in the metropolis. Dana made his museum of interest to working people and the middle class. In 1912 he got up the first industrial arts exhibition ever held in the U. S.; 1,300 items of Austrian and German craftsmanship. He arranged an exhibition of jewelry (something Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art has not yet got around to), displayed New Jersey textiles, New Jersey bath tubs. New Jersey citizens came in droves.

A great consulter of the public, John Cotton Dana sat him down in 1914 and in 15 homely chapters cut through the welter of U. S. snobbery and callowness about Art. In his classic American Art: How It Can be Made to Flourish, he observed that the ability to tell a well-designed teacup should precede precious talk about Giotto; and he urged the purchase and study of contemporary work by U. S. designers and artists. The Museum lived up to this so consistently that in 1925, when Dana was in Italy and a rich Newark lady sent him $10.000 with which to acquire old Italian things, he saved the money and persuaded her to let him spend it on American paintings. The next year the Museum moved into a $750,000 building given by Department Storeman Louis Bamberger, held a long remembered exhibition of New Jersey leather products and processes.

Meanwhile Director Dana had brought art to the people by such further innovations as museum branches (in his own branch libraries), free tours for school children, exhibitions of well-designed articles bought for a dime apiece in the city stores, a "lending collection" of art objects ranging from Tibetan to Pennsylvanian, packed in neat boxes and borrowed like library books. When John Cotton Dana died ten years ago this month, he had coaxed the annual city appropriation from $10,000 to $150,000, upped annual attendance to 125,000, won the title of "Newark's First Citizen."

Since then the Newark Museum, under Director Dana's devoted successor, Beatrice Winser, has gone through lean years and come out with no activities lost. Meanwhile, the rest of the country has been catching up with it. Museum workers trained in Dana's "apprentice classes" (another first in the U. S.) have taken his fresh attack into a dozen important museums. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art has adopted a policy of exhibiting industrial design, has added architecture. Most important of all, John Cotton Dana's social philosophy of art inspired the nation's first Federal Art Project through its director, Holger Cahill, who worked under Dana from 1922 to 1929.

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