Summer Refresher

"We lead the world in genius for invention, efficiency and utility. There is no reason why we cannot eventually do so in the genius for art and literature." With such hearty optimism, a steel baron named Joseph Green Butler Jr. founded an art institute in Youngstown, Ohio 39 years ago. To set the strictly American tone of the place, he planted a befeathered bronze Indian in front of the $500,000 colonnaded building designed by the Manhattan firm of McKim, Mead & White. With Youngstown University near by, the two blocks surrounding the museum soon developed into the cultural strip of the U.S.'s third biggest steel center.

Last week, full in the buzzing hot Ohio July, the Butler Institute of American Art was crammed with a new show of U.S. paintings and jammed with people to see them. It was no leader yet of world art, but a happy model of the small-city U.S. museum in summer bloom.

Up from a Brokerage. The occasion was the institute's 23rd annual art exhibit, which since 1953, when prize totals topped $5,000 has become a national affair that gives artists a summer-season target worth shooting at. On the walls were 50 paintings from past prizewinners and another 250 winnowed out from the 1,701 entries submitted; they divided about evenly between abstract and realistic.

The $1,000 first-prize winner in oils was a hot orange-and-red living-room interior by Gregorio Prestopino (TIME, Jan. 26, 1948). It seemed to suit the factory workers, ladies' clubbers and art fanciers of Youngstown (pop. 180,000); so many came on opening night that the rum for the punch bowl ran out. The painting and the other winners also pleased Joseph Green Butler III, the institute's greying, quiet, 57-year-old director.

In 1924 after he graduated from Dartmouth, Joe Butler III followed his steel-baron grandfather and his father Henry A. Butler into management work at the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. Later he worked for a while in the family brokerage firm. But when his father died, Joe took on museum directing as well as brokering. It was too much. Forced to decide between them, he chose to be director of the Butler Institute of American Art.

On to Indispensability. The museum that Butler runs concentrates solely on American art; thanks largely to the $1,500,000 endowment of Founder Butler, it got in early on collecting U.S. paintings. Grandfather Butler spent 40 years tracking down his favorite painting for the collection: Winslow Homer's Snap the Whip (TIME, Aug. 23, 1954). The Butler Institute today has 635 oils, 500 prints, 365 watercolors and drawings, including top works by John Singleton Copley, James Peale, William Harnett, Thomas Eakins and Albert Ryder--far more than enough to fill the two-story museum's nine galleries.

Joe Butler III has made it his six-day-a-week job to increase the institute's indispensability to Youngstown. He stepped up buying for the collection, launched the midsummer annual. One early move was to rescind his grandfather's rule of no smoking in the galleries, thus bring back the Buckeye Club, a group of Sunday painters who now meet regularly at the institute to criticize one another's paintings. Last year more than 40,000 Youngstowners crossed the threshold, and Butler feels that his museum is booming. Of this year's exhibition he says with satisfaction: "You won't find very many clams. This is good stuff all the way through."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.