South of Sahara

When Artist-Adventurer Frank McEwen took up his new job last year as director of the Rhodes National Gallery in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, he knew that he would face some problems as new as his gallery. One big one was that in primitive Southern Rhodesia (pop. 2,400,000) there was hardly any art. McEwen flew back to Europe to gather a loan exhibition, only to find that "most of the people I approached on the Continent had never heard of Rhodesia, and those that had saw their cherished treasures hanging in a clearing in the jungle or round the walls of a mud hut." Last week, as a result of McEwen's persistence, his gallery was staging the biggest and best exhibition of paintings, prints and drawings ever assembled south of the Sahara.

Somehow McEwen had talked London's National Gallery, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, Paris' Louvre and other museums into parting with 200 treasures--Rembrandts, Cezannes, Picassos, etc.--for a Rhodesian show. The 200 oils and more than that number of graphic art pieces were flown across the equator in five well-packed planeloads. Said McEwen: "It is unlikely that such a show will ever be seen again in Africa because of the difficulties and the reluctance of overseas galleries to allow valuable works of art to travel so far afield."

Another show of the kind will be even more unlikely when the lending museums get full reports on some of the difficulties. In high (4,825 ft.), dry Salisbury the humidity at night falls as low as 30%. With his gallery's humidifiers not yet in action. McEwen found that the dangerously low humidity was stretching the priceless canvases so taut that "they were ready to explode." To fight the dry air, McEwen and his Rhodesian sculptress wife, Cecilia, night after night dashed between their .flat and the gallery to drape damp towels over the frames of the stretching masterpieces. When asked about the effect of this do-it-yourself humidifying on the canvases, McEwen had a ready answer: "Emergencies demand drastic measures. That was all we could do. Anyway we saved the day--or rather the nights."

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