Worcester to Manhattan

Art is an elastic term. In Manhattan's huge Metropolitan Museum it is stretched to cover stained glass, mummies, armor, textiles, musical instruments, a Hindu temple, an Etruscan safety pin, acres of painting and sculpture--all crammed into a great grey building that sprawls along four city blocks. To direct this illustrated history of human culture the Metropolitan's trustees last week elected Francis Henry Taylor, 36, since 1931 director of the Worcester (Mass.) Art Museum.

Amiable, rotund Francis Taylor is one of the young directors now engaged in making U. S. museums look alive.* He believes that a museum's function, like Gaul, is divided into three parts : acquiring art, luring people in to see it, teaching them to make it part of their daily lives. The average American sees the inside of an art museum only once in five years. By upping attendance from 37,000 to 145,000 a year, Director Taylor made a monkey of this average at Worcester. A similar opportunity awaits him at the Metropolitan, where attendance has slumped in the last decade from 1,250,000 to 946,000 (though the Cloisters, its separate branch of medieval art, opened in 1938, now more than makes up the difference).

Francis Taylor's predecessor as director of the Metropolitan, famed Egyptologist Herbert Eustis Winlock, resigned last April because of ill health. When he tackles the job next May, Director Taylor will face many a knotty problem. Chief problem will be to regain some of the initiative the Metropolitan has lost to younger, less stodgy Manhattan museums, notably the Museum of Modern Art in its shiny new blue glass home (TIME, May 22). There, instead of at the Metropolitan, will open next week the show of Renaissance masterpieces which Italy sent last year to the San Francisco Fair. Another poser: to adjust shrinking income from endowments to heavy fixed charges that brought a cumulative deficit of $11,000 in the past two years.

*Others: The Chicago Art Institute's Daniel Catton Rich, the (Manhattan) Museum of Modern Art's Alfred H. Barr Jr., the San Francisco Museum's Grace McCann Morley, the Los Angeles Museum's Roland J. McKinney.

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