War Among Masterpieces

How two U.S. museums, 5,000 miles apart, readied themselves for war:

In Manhattan, the Metropolitan Museum wound up a mammoth moving job. Safely stowed in a secret steel and concrete country house 100 miles from New York are 10,000 art treasures--enough to be the nucleus of another great museum. The Metropolitan has been laying evacuation plans for two years: it fears friendly ack-ack shells more than enemy bombs. Gold and silver, ivory, jades and jewelry have gone into bank vaults. A carefully chosen 2% of the museum's remaining 500,000 treasures have been trucked to the country hideaway. Gone are the Altman and most of the Morgan collections, the Van Eycks and other Flemish Primitives, Rubens' bulky Venus and Adonis, the museum's most famous El Greco, View of Toledo.

To protect what remains, the museum has boarded up its three big domes and the large outside windows, will replace some of the skylights with wood and put chicken wire under the rest. Led by Fireman Thomas Hughes, a retired New York Battalion Chief, 125 museum attendants practice regularly, dashing about the halls with twelve baby-buggy-like fire trucks. The museum has its drills so pat that public and staff can clear out in three minutes.

Gaps in the Met's galleries are being filled with contemporary art displays. Twitted because he's willing to expose recent art where he wouldn't risk an old master, plump, practical Director Francis Henry Taylor replies, reasonably: "If the man is still alive he can paint another picture. And it should be a better one."

In Honolulu, the Academy of Arts issued its annual report. Highlights:

> On Sunday, Dec. 7, six employes reached the museum, lugged its finest items to previously chosen safety spots Next day they reinforced the basement sandbagged the building, installed new "secondary" shows. Tuesday they opened on schedule.

> The Japanese gallery has been turned into a sewing center.

> Wartime shows to date include: drawings (by Robert Bach) of the attack on Bellows Field, Hawaiian quilts, ventilators for blackouts--an exhibition which the Academy insists "esthetically, practically, and from the point of view of public interest . . . completely justifies itself."

> During alerts, books, games and drawing materials amuse visiting children who hurry to the museum's air-raid shelter. Counseled the Academy: "It has been found that a can of cookies is a very necessary part of a museum's wartime equipment."

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