American Louvre

This week the U. S. Government got a present: the largest marble building in the world. The building was the National Gallery of Art. The two creators of the building were not present at its formal opening : they were both dead -- Donor Andrew W. Mellon, onetime Secretary of the Treasury, and Architect John Russell Pope. The building alone cost $15,000,000; the art masterpieces that went with it were valued at $50,000,000. The Gallery, which spread its great, windowless length 782 ft. along Constitution Avenue, diagonally opposite the Smithsonian Institution, had a massive rotunda patterned after the Pantheon in Rome.

This week a crowd of 8,000 people poured through the pillared rotunda and milled through the vaulted halls. In the name of the nation, President Roosevelt accepted the museum from Paul Mellon, son of Andrew.

Visitors found much to marvel at, much to admire. The four and a half acres of oak-floored galleries were fitted with comfortable, upholstered sofas. In all the 90 galleries on the main floor, light fell with scientifically controlled evenness through laminated glass skylights, which let in diffused sunlight by day, artificial sunlight by night. In the basement, a Dali dream of convoluted pipes and fans air-conditioned the whole building, from the soaring spaces of the rotunda to the tiled cafeteria where staff and public could snatch a sandwich between expeditions.

To Collector Mellon's $50,000,000 worth of pictures and sculptures, 5-io-25-cent Storeman Samuel Henry Kress two years ago had added another $30,000,000 worth.

But even the addition of the Widener Collection (12 to 50 million dollars worth), promised eventually to the National Gallery by Philadelphia's horse-racing Joseph E. Widener, would leave plenty of room for future donations.

Art connoisseurs found the National Gallery's strong points were: 1) the Kress collection of Italian art, one of the largest and most comprehensive in the U. S.; 2) a gallery of nine over-average Rembrandts; 3) a bevy of British mantelpiece portraits, including Sir Joshua Reynolds' famed $500,000 portrait of Lady Elizabeth Compton; 4) top-flight pictures by Dutchmen Vermeer and Frans Hals, Flemings van Eyck, Memling, Rubens and van Dyck. Conservative by present-day museum standards, the Gallery is long on portraiture, short on Spanish art, entirely lacking in important French works.

Like the Louvre in Paris, Washington's National Gallery was intended to include only the works of the past. A rigid rule excluding the work of all artists who had not been dead for 20 years tabooed all moderns. As Luxembourg to its Louvre, Washington has plans for another museum, the Smithsonian Gallery of Art. The competition for the Gallery's design was won two years ago by famed Finnish Architect Eliel Saarinen and associates. But, so far, the Smithsonian Gallery is still in the planning stage.

Biggest contribution ever made to a government by a private individual, Andrew Mellon's marble treasure house might well grow some day into one of the world's greatest national museums.

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