ART: Flower Pots

As a gardener, Mrs. Johanna Knowles Woodwell Hailman is the semiofficial guardian of Pittsburgh parks. She has had a hybrid amaryllis and a yellow calceolaria named in her honor. As an able artist, blunt, bulky, bossy Mrs. Hailman (whose inherited wealth comes from wholesale hardware) frequently gets paintings into Pittsburgh’s Carnegie International, where her Spider Lilies last month was called “brash, big, garish” by Edward Alden Jewell of the New York Times. Each autumn, as head of the citizens’ committee that manages Phipps Conservatory in Schenley Park, Mrs. Hailman puts on a chrysanthemum show as a background for an exhibition by the Sculptors’ Society of Pittsburgh.

Feature statue this year, until the day before the show opened, was Clarence Dennis Courtney’s thick-lipped, butter-yellow Pastoral Buddha (see cut). Then Sculptor Courtney discovered that Pastoral Buddha had lost its place of honor, was half-hidden in a bower of palms and chrysanthemums. Said Mrs. Hailman, when denounced for this and other shifts, “I moved them around to make them look better, like you would move flower pots around.” The indignant Sculptors’ Society, to whom sculpture is no flower pot, withdrew in a huff, last week opened its own show, across the street from Mrs. Hailman’s chrysanthemums.