Art: Window Pains

Last week Robert Marion Metcalf could congratulate himself on a big job well done, in the nick of time. A short, baldish, bustling American with a fringe-beard, he knows and loves medieval stained glass. Since 1938 he has been scurrying around France with a Leica camera, color-photographing stained glass windows faster than the French Government could replace them in the Gothic cathedrals from which it removed them during World War I. He photographed all the windows in tide-swept Mont St. Michel, Le Mans, Chartres. At times when he had to stop and rest, Robert Metcalf and his wife mounted his tiny 35 mm. color pictures between glass slides.

When World War II threatened last August, Metcalf speeded up his tempo to a frenzy. He thought he might never get another chance. Before War began Sept. 1, the Metcalfs caught the first U. S.-bound boat. As the French Government again began to remove its irreplaceable stained glass panes and chances seemed even that the windows which had survived nearly 800 years of Europe’s wars might not survive this one, Robert Metcalf’s 14,000 slides were the only complete record of these Gothic treasures in existence. The slides will be housed at the Dayton (Ohio) Art Institute, which hopes to send traveling exhibitions to colleges, schools, other museums.