Art: Ringling Day

There are a Ringling Boulevard and a Main Ringling Boulevard, Ringling Causeway, Ringling Island and Ringling Trust & Savings Bank, but the town is still called Sarasota, Fla. The bank and all the shops were closed last week to honor the latest benefaction of Sarasota’s first citizen: the opening of the Junior College and School of Art of the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Senator Duncan Upshaw Fletcher and Congressman Herbert Jackson Drane were there to make speeches. Bishop John Monroe Moore gave the benediction of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. His moonlike face wreathed in smiles, John Ringling himself was there to turn the buildings over to their new director, Dr. Ludd Myrl Spivey.

Two generations of U. S. boys have gazed at the profiles of the five Ringling Brothers and their imposing mustaches pasted on the cow barns of the nation. As a matter of fact there were not five brothers but seven: Al. Gus. Otto, Alf T.. Charles E., John and Henry and their names were not Ringling but Rungeling. “Ringling” was a newspaper misprint which they decided not to correct.

The Rungeling brothers spent their childhood in Baraboo, Wis. and Baraboo remained the winter quarters of their circuses for many years. All seven brothers were in the business but the five that adorned the posters were the partners. At an early family conference it was decided that Brothers Gus and Henry had better just work on a salary. Al was the ringmaster, Otto sold the tickets, Charles wrote the mouth-filling polysyllabic advertisements. John, who used to play the bass viol and drive the lead wagon over dusty prairie roads, became the router, the greatest transportation expert in the circus business*. He lost his brothers and his mustache. He absorbed Barnum & Bailey and in time every important circus in the U. S. so that today every trained lion in the country must jump through hoops when John Rungeling cracks the whip. And he has assembled the largest private art collection in the U. S. with the exception of Willlaim Randolph Hearst’s.

Mr. John, as the tent shows call him, first showed an interest in art about 30 years ago when he went to Europe to find new artists to draw circus posters. His interest is genuine; he picks out most of the purchases himself. Mr. John is still enough of a circus man to like his pictures big. He has the largest private collection of Rubens in the world. The pink stucco, palladian-arched John & Mable Ringling Museum contains about 20 galleries and features mountainous bronze reproductions of Michaelangelo’s David and the Father Nile and Father Tiber from the Vatican Gardens. It is useless to show him modern pictures, but dealers have dis covered that if they have nothing large, a religious subject is often a temptation. Ten years ago he decided to build a museum for his collection. The pink Venetian palace in Sarasota was the result ; the museum idea expanded into the art school and junior college. Mr. John imported a faculty (largely from the Grand Central Art Galleries of New York) headed by Dr. Spivey, president of South ern College, Lakeland, Fla., and built dormitories for men and women, and a dining hall. First student to register was one Frank Norman of Minden, La. Student Norman explained last week that the reason he has chosen the Ringling School of Art to complete his education was that he knew and admired certain members of the faculty, Professor Verman Kimbrough and a Mr. Looney.