Art: Millennium at Cleveland

To listen to the last millennium’s most important music would take a month. To read the essential literature of the last ten centuries would require several years. Last week nearly 1,000 years of Europe’s art was visible in a day at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s 20th Anniversary Exhibition, celebrating the Great Lakes Exposition. Borrowed by suave, dapper, erudite Director William Mathewson Milliken in the astonishingly short time of five months, from U. S. museums and private collectors, from the Louvre in Paris and from half a dozen Italian collectors, Cleveland’s paintings made a show more comprehensive and legible than Chicago’s two great art exhibits at the Century of Progress (TIME, May 29, 1933; June 11, 1934). Director Milliken’s most resounding brag last week was that 28 of his pictures had neverbefore been exhibited in the U. S., including those by Titian, Raphael, Bellini, Lotto, Veronese, Tintoretto, Andrea del Sarto, Holbein, Rembrandt, Terburg and Henri-Julien Rousseau’s famed Night of the Carnival, “one of the greatest sensations of the modern age.” All will stay in Cleveland until Oct. 4.

On June 9, 1311, the great Italian banking city of Siena was fighting an economic death struggle with booming Florence as Duccio di Buoninsegna finished his altarpiece for the cathedral. The city’s nine merchant magistrates declared a public holiday. Duccio and his altarpiece were paraded through the streets to the cathedral. At the sight the Siennese fell on their knees as all the church bells tolled. Siena’s greatest masterpiece, this work marked both the end of the Byzantine influence which the Crusaders had brought back from Palestine and the beginning of an authentic Christian art in the West. Most of the altarpiece is still in Siena, but two superb little panels showing a 14th Century Italian Christ resurrecting Lazarus and meeting the Samaritan woman fell into the hands of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who let Cleveland exhibit them last week. Said Director Milliken, “The Duccios are the prize catch of the show. I just can’t believe they’re here.”

As Siena declined in art and war, Florence grew great. Transition painter in Cleveland’s show is Lorenzo Monaco, Siena-born, Florence-bred. He was followed by a virile stampede of topnotch Florentine painters : Filippo Lippi, Piero di Cosimo, Andrea del Castagno, Fra Angelico, Andrea del Sarto, all at Cleveland and all masters of form who had graduated from the childish mysticism of the Gothic. In Venice and Genoa, however, the Gothic spirit hung on a little longer in the magical paintings of Crivelli, Lotto, Magnasco and Strozzi. Lotto’s Pieta is one of Cleveland’s most striking pictures: a huge, bullnecked Christ crucified whose dead skin lies in ghastly contrast against the living flesh of His friends. Crivelli adds to his Madonna and Child a huge housefly, an exactly rendered cucumber, a halo like a round sheet of riveted steel.

As the sea power of Venice began to decline, its greatest artists went to work. In Cleveland were Titian’s lush, rhythmical Education of Cupid whose light blue wings emerge sharply from the deep brown background, his splendid Adoration of the Magi, a portrait of a superb, haughty-eyed Spanish cardinal. There, too, were the other great Venetians, Tintoretto’s famed Susanna and the Elders, and Veronese’s velvet and lace portrait of a blonde. All of these, from Lotto to Veronese, seemed as if they might have been painted by men living today. Still more astonishing was the emergence from El Greco’s Holy Family of the face of Cinemactress ZaSu Pitts.

Across the face of Europe Cleveland’s show moves north to the little-known primitive masters of the Teutonic cities. With Gothic materialism, Austria’s 15th Century Master Pfenning painted the dazzling yellow robe of a magus worshipping the Christ Child, having first laid his crown on the ground while two swallows watch from the stable roof. The Master of Heiligenkreuz painted the dying Virgin Mary surrounded by saints, of whom two read furiously while the others fold preternaturally long-fingered hands.

Moving westward, the show reaches the Low Countries and Petrus Christus, Rogier Van der Weyden and Hans Memling. As The Netherlands rose to the sea power Venice had long since lost, it entered its great age of painting with Rubens, Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Terburg, the last of whom Director Milliken believes has been greatly “underestimated” by 20th Century art lovers. Terburg’s Portrait of a Lady Standing marvelously picks out the shimmering threads of satin; his Young Man has a simplification and use of chiaroscuro all but modern.

Cleveland’s show touches 17th & 18th Century Spain with Velasquez and Goya, 18th Century Britain with its great gallery of portraitists. Thomas Lawrence’s portrait at Cleveland of the coy English actress. Miss Farren, who became the Countess of Derby, is called by Director Milliken “greater than Gainsborough’s Blue Boy.”

The Cleveland show matched the thoroughness with which it handled the Italian Renaissance in its coverage of the art of 19th Century France. Of this vast, variegated horde of masters, Director Milliken simply showed them all from Delacroix to Marcel Duchamp’s cubistic NudeDescending a Staircase. The Renoirs and Manets were isolated each to themselves, in alcoves fenced off by brief partitions. The Renoirs, swimming in shimmering, sunbathed pastels of water and flesh, gathered around the famed, huge Luncheon of the Boating Party.

Only meagre part of Cleveland’s show was the casual collection of U. S. painting. Clevelanders were particularly excited about John Singer Sargent’s portrait of onetime Clevelander John D. Rockefeller Sr., lent by Son Rockefeller. Other famed U. S. pictures: George Bellows’ Stag at Sharkey’s, Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Death on a Pale Horse, Whistler’s The White Girl.

Director Milliken’s unique achievement was to get all his masters into one museum without letting them fight. So natural was the progression of pictures and schools, so considerately was each of the 385 paintings displayed in its place, that visitors were last week amazed to feel no museum fatigue after making the rounds.

One reason Cleveland was able to assemble so imposing a show was that collectors’ resistance to lending their treasures had been largely broken three years ago by the art-beggars from Chicago’s Century of Progress. Notable Milliken borrowings were Memling’s Portrait of a Man Holding a Carnation from J. P. Morgan, a Titian and a Raphael from Paris’ haughty Louvre Museum and two great Italian works from Italy’s Italico Brass. Among Clevelanders who lent Director Milliken 79 pictures in all were three members of the Hanna family and the estate of Cleveland’s Tycoon John L. Severance. Director Milliken, expecting a 75% average, had a 98% success.