Limners & Whittlers

The city of New York has its share of great museums, but there is one rich area of art that none of them give adequate houseroom to. This is American folk art--the vast treasury of weather vanes and limners' portraits, of whittled toys and cigar-store Indians that were also objects of genuine beauty. To those with affection for the field, this shortcoming has been especially galling, for there was a time when the city had two of the best collections in the country. Unhappily for New Yorkers, the pioneering collection of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller ended up in Williamsburg, Va., and the collection of Electra Havemeyer Webb became the nucleus of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.

Last week, after years of careful planning, a group of Manhattan dealers and collectors announced that the void had been filled. Turning themselves into a board of trustees for a new Museum of Early American Folk Arts, they acquired and will soon occupy quarters on West 53rd Street, near the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. In a dramatic sendoff, the new museum also opened a choice first exhibition in the Exhibit Center of the TIME & LIFE Building, two blocks away. If there was one fault with the show, it was this: it would be hard to top.

The museum's president, Joseph B. Martinson, retired head of the coffee firm and a collector himself, acknowledges that the boundaries of folk art are hard to define. The artists range from the greatly talented Edward Hicks to a legion of traveling painters who could turn out a portrait in less than an hour for the price of $2.92. The freshness of the art. in fact, stems largely from its variety and degrees of sophistication. A wooden Columbia, all star-spangled-bannered, is a wonderfully flamboyant bit of jingoism. A large copper

Hound that stood guard in front of the Hare and Hound Tavern in Syracuse has all the elegance of the live animal itself.

There was humor, as in the brightly uniformed Captain Jinks, who once was in front of a cigar store. And there was a talent for caricature, as in the stubby statue of Henry Ward Beecher. A Carrousel Rooster scampers off to nowhere, each wooden feather in place. A copper lady of fashion, which once adorned a dressmaker's establishment, is a swirl of rhythm. Eagles, monkeys, cats, lions, woodchucks, hogs, pouter pigeons, turtles and horses make up a delightful menagerie that reported on the wind, beckoned to the thirsty, announced the presence of circuses, and symbolized the glory of the nation. To the most humdrum of days, they added a touch of color; to the drabbest of buildings, they gave a bit of dignity; and for the vitality and imagination of a whole people, they provided the perfect outlet.

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