Sweeney's Way

James Johnson Sweeney has been director of Houston's Museum of Fine Arts for two years, five months and four days. That is perhaps two years longer than some of his former colleagues in Manhattan-recalling how he stomped out of his job at the Guggenheim Museum-would have predicted. Expectably, he has stirred things up, but aside from having to display some Remington cowboy art that he loathes, he has had his own way.

When Houston asked him to put on a show of local talent, he said it would be too parochial. Instead, he proposed and put on a show of 83 works selected from 889 entries gathered from the Southwest-which he decreed to be bordered roughly by the Mississippi River on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. He has acquired art of quality, whether it be a torso from ancient Greece, The Walking Man by Rodin, a Calder stabile, or a 23-ft.-long carved crocodile from New Guinea. And he sometimes exhibits things just to keep Houston up to date with the latest fads. Last week, in the big hall designed by Mies van der Rohe that forms a wing of the original Greek revival building, he was showing something called Gorgo in New York-a papier-mache dinosaur walking over a city of toy cars and trains, a papier-mache serpent crushing a rocking horse, plus gears of a clock, a half-full milk carton, a pot of roses. It was made by Sculptress Niki de Saint-Phalle, who finished the job by spraying it white and splattering it with black by means of shooting attached bags of paint full of bullet holes.

Seen a Head? To judge by attendance figures (247,000 last year), and by the generosity of the museum's patrons,

Sweeney has been a success. But the lengths to which he will go to make the museum the liveliest in the real South west were most strikingly demonstrated when he started working on his next exhibit, pre-Columbian art.

On a trip to Mexico he got interested in a huge head from the great Olmec culture (500-100 B.C.) that was still half buried in the jungle.- More than a year ago, he armed himself with letters from the President and Vice President of the U.S., and talked the Mexican Tourist Bureau into agreeing to lend the head to Houston. All he knew about finding the head was that it lay somewhere on the island of San Lorenzo be tween two rivers, about 40 miles from the town of Minatitlan in southern Mexico. The Mexican government lent Sweeney a helicopter, and with it he flew from village to village scrutinizing the terrain for any big heads, and occasionally landing to inquire if the villagers had seen one. The helicopter pilot eventually spotted the head, buried in a ten-foot hole and surrounded by such dense jungle that it was invisible to anyone 15 yards away.

Rain & Restlessness. The Mexicans agreed to build Sweeney a road so that the head could be taken out. But the rainy season came and then Christmas; it was not until after Easter this year that Sweeney got back to Mexico. Sure enough, the Ministry of Marine had almost finished the road, clearing away giant trees and building bridges over streams. But now the people in nearby San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan were growing restless. In return for losing their head, they demanded a new schoolhouse. The governor of the state wholeheartedly agreed to give them one.

Just as rain threatened to wash away the new road, the 16-ton head was removed by trailer and then shipped on loan to Houston. This week it arrived-a superb, Buddha-like sculpture nine feet high, whose meaning to the Olmec civilization is lost to history.

* In upper left, Sweeney. * And photographed in color for TIME, Oct. 21, 1957.

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