In the lobby of New York's famous Music Box theater, when the new Maxwell Anderson-Kurt Weill musical play, Lost in the Stars, opens on Oct. 30, theatergoers will see an unusual exhibit of paintings. Its presence there is due to a dramatic coincidence--involving a story that appeared in TIME'S Art department on Aug. 8, and an art-loving TIME-reader, Miss Elizabeth Winston, who read the story in TIME'S Atlantic Edition while on her vacation in Paris.

Lost in the Stars, as many of you may know, is based on Cry, the Beloved Country, the recent best-seller about white-Negro tension in South Africa. The TIME account was of a touring exhibition of South African paintings and sculpture at the National Gallery in Washington. Conspicuous in the show, said TIME'S Editors, were the vivid works of G. Sekoto, the only Negro artist included, who had taught himself to paint in Johannesburg, then left his native land to study in Paris, only to find poverty and despair, to attempt suicide and to be committed to an asylum for the mentally ill.

Now let TIME-Reader Winston finish the story, as she recently wrote it in a letter to me: "On July 22, I wandered into an art gallery on the left bank in Paris and was attracted to some paintings by G. Sekoto. The name meant nothing to me--and I knew I had already spent more money on my trip than I had planned--but I also knew I had to have some of his paintings. I hesitated, then sacrificed some of the dresses I had bought in Paris to buy two paintings from the gallery's owner, a M. de Cardonne.

"A week later, when I was about ready to sail home, I picked up my Aug. 8 copy of TIME. (I always turn to Music first, then Art, People third, and then to the front inside cover and read straight through to the ad on the back.) I never did get beyond Art of that issue, however, because there was a self-portrait and the pathetic story of Sekoto! "I dashed back to the gallery waving my copy of TIME, and showed it to De Cardonne, saying, 'Let's get this to Sekoto right away!' Imagine my astonishment when he called into the little back room where he had been preparing some food, 'Sekoto -- here's a lady with some good news for you.' From the darkness a slight figure emerged and said, 'What good news can there be for me?' He would not even raise his eyes. Finally I read the story to him, then he asked if he could see it himself. While he was reading and re-reading it, De Cardonne told me that very morning Sekoto, partially cured of his nervous breakdown, had been released from St.

Anne's hospital in his care. So touched that he could scarcely speak, Sekoto mur mured, 'This is the most wonderful thing that's ever happened to me.' "When I returned to New York I got in touch with the Playwrights' Company who, after listening to my story, looking at the paintings, and reading the TIME article, immediately commissioned Gerard Sekoto to do a poster for the play -- and in addition, began to make arrangements for the theater-lobby exhibit of Sekoto paintings of his native land."

TIME'S founders conceived of an Art department which, while performing the function of criticism, would roam over the entire field of art journalism from old masters to contemporary painters. For like nearly every other aspect of each week's important happenings, the news of art is not always to be found in the big galleries, but frequently in alleys and side streets and back rooms like that of M. de Cardonne in Paris.

Cordially yours,

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