Art: PICTURES FOR THE NATION

WASHINGTON’S National Gallery, which will be 15 years old next March, is already deep in plans for its birthday celebration. Main item on the agenda: unveiling 150 masterpieces from the Samuel H. Kress collection. As an indication of the superb quality of the new Kress donations, the gallery this week made public the names of six (see color pages). Each was a masterpiece in the proper sense of the word: clear and present evidence of the artist’s genius crossed with the spirit of his age.

Perhaps the most exciting of the lot was Grünewald’s Crucifixion, one of just 15 paintings by the German master that are known to exist. The torment of Grünewald’s art exerts a peculiar fascination for 20th century connoisseurs: more than 400 studies of him have been published since 1914. The National Gallery has always been weak in German art (as are most galleries west of the Rhine) but the Kress gifts will change all that. According to Guy Emerson, vice director of the Kress Foundation, Grünewald’s Crucifixion will dominate “the finest room of German paintings outside of Germany.”

The National Gallery’s Italian Renaissance collection has always been topnotch, except for high-Renaissance (16th and 17th century) art. The Kress gifts will correct that weakness as well, if only by the announced addition of three masterpieces, by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, from the golden age of Venice. Zurbaran’s big convent picture will give new weight to the Spanish section, and Watteau’s charming Ceres will add a lift to the 18th century French collection.

The Kress Foundation can and does move mountains of dimes to buy great pictures. It is the whale of the masterpiece market, and despite restrictions on the international sales of masterpieces, it gets a whale-size share of the few that come on the market each year. With its help the National Gallery is amassing an art treasure beyond the dreams of kings. Smaller U.S. museums benefit as well. The Kress Foundation has made donations averaging 32 canvases each to twelve regional museums (TIME, April 27, 1953), and will soon announce similar gifts to eight more. Of the more than 2,000 paintings and sculptures Kress has bought so far, only a fourth will remain in Washington.