Arts: Light in Los Angeles

Southern California, scene of the mighty creative labors of Screenland, is not notable for cultivation of the more modest arts and crafts. Walter Conrad Arensberg, one of the quietest and most discriminating U. S. collectors of modern art, has said that in Hollywood he enjoys the most perfect vacuum America can produce. A symbol of this condition has long been the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art. Supported by the County of Los Angeles, it has boasted a beautiful lawn, a superb collection of fossils, and, since the last one was fired early in Depression, no art curator at all.

Last winter critics of all this, principally the Los Angeles Times’ able art reviewer Arthur Millier, were joined by Los Angelenos who beheld the glories of art in San Francisco and were abashed. In February Los Angeles County responded by snagging, as its new art curator, Roland McKinney, the serious, easy-mannered young man who combed America for the San Francisco Fair’s big show of contemporary paintings (TIME, March 6). Roland McKinney has great repute among museum directors because of his work at the Baltimore Museum from 1929 to October 1937. A strong believer in the Federal Art Project, he thinks “we are about ready to go over the top toward something approaching the high Renaissance.”

Over the previous Los Angeles top went Roland McKinney last week with his first exhibition at the Museum of History, Science and Art. Recognizing right off the bat the most lively art of the neighborhood he devoted the whole exhibition to work done on the Southern California Art Project. Under the direction of S. (for Stanton) MacDonald-Wright,* the project has concentrated on outdoor murals befitting the climate. On view were striking murals in many mediums, notably mosaic, petrachrome (dyed concrete in which are mixed little stones of varied color), and terra cotta slabs in low relief (an early Mesopotamian medium in which no serious work has been done for 2,500 years).

Da Vinci Discoveries

Italy’s great exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci material at Milan this summer (TIME, May 29) put a wild thought in the head of a visitor named Carlo Noya. Signor Noya went home to the coastal town of Savona. He had an old picture at home and to him it looked strangely like some of the Leonardos he had seen. He fetched it to Milan, showed it to such experts as Adolfo Venturi. It did not take the experts long to know it for the work of “a great Tuscan master of the Renaissance.” nor much longer to announce last week that it will be hung in the da Vinci exhibition as, in all probability, the master’s long-lost and long-sought Madonna with the Cat.

Discoveries like this are recurrent mysteries in the art world. Often enough they end in disappointment. What made Carlo Noya’s picture sensational is that, although there are many Leonardo drawings, experts concede only 13 (some only four) da Vinci paintings to exist. The British Museum has one of the best of numerous pen studies for a Madonna with the Cat. In Britain, too, is the one man whom Italian scholars need to consult before pronouncing their find authentic, Sir Kenneth McKenzie Clark, director of the National Gallery since 1934.

When the librarian of Windsor Castle in 1930 dropped in the hands of 27-year-old Kenneth Clark the job of cataloguing the King’s collection of Leonardo da Vinci drawings, a rich artistic province was bestowed on an obscure subaltern. Clark’s qualifications consisted mainly in the esteem of Critic Bernard Berenson (TIME, April 10) and two years of work with him in Florence. But with the job went a sure succession of official honors for tall, personable, athletic Kenneth Clark, and publication of the catalogue made him in due time the foremost modern authority on Leonardo da Vinci. Fortnight ago in London and Manhattan appeared the full harvest gathered from Subaltern Clark’s wide province: a fresh appraisal of Leonardo* and his growth as an artist, based on evidence uncovered in the drawings. As truly as the new Madonna in Milan, it constitutes a rediscovery of Leonardo.

A large part of the work discussed as Leonardo’s by such 19th-Century critics as Walter Pater was not done by Leonard at all, but by his followers. “But after 50 years of research and stylistic analysis,”writes Kenneth Clark, “we have at last reached some sort of general agreement as to which pictures and drawings are really by Leonardo. We must [now again] look at pictures as creations not simply of the human hand, but of the human spirit. . . .”

Looking thus at da Vinci’s art, Kenneth Clark finds himself most attracted to certain works of precisely the same period as the Madonna with the Cat, done in Leonardo’s late twenties. The drawings for the Madonna with the Cat “show, as nothing else in his work, a direct and happy approach to life ” As Leonardo’s intellectual wrestle with painting went on even his drawings became less spontaneous and his paintings took on a cold quality of mystery.

Kenneth Clark does not press profoundly into the conflicts of da Vinci’s character. But he is often suggestive, as when he says that Leonardo’s restless versatility, which in later life kept him busy experimenting with grandiose and unpractical engineering projects when he should have been painting, was “a disease of the will similar to that which ruined the magnificent intellect of Coleridge.” Like Coleridge da Vinci had a turbulent romantic imagination. In his unfinished Adoration of the Kings he painted what Clark calls “the most revolutionary and anticlassical picture of the 15th Century,” extraordinary for an El Grecoesque swirl of uncountable figures. But Leonardo’s passion for scientific precision and classical finish, in Kenneth Clark’s opinion, checked, delayed and exhausted him.

Last week there was little likelihood of Sir Kenneth Clark making a visit to Milan to authenticate a new da Vinci. Sir Kenneth moved his handsome Scottish wife and three children to the country, closed their beautiful house at 30 Portland Place, took rooms in Gray’s Inn. As Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, Sir Kenneth has the duty of guarding the royal collections at Buckingham Palace, Windsor and Hampton Court. It was a busy week for him.

*Brother of the late Willard Huntington Wright,”S. S. Van Dine.” *LEONARDO DA VINCI Macmillan ($5).