Valentiner's Week

Last week occurred the 50th birthday of Director William R. Valentiner of the Detroit Institute of Arts, onetime director of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. It was perhaps his happiest birthday. First, 50 friends gave him a dinner, and $5,000 in gold. Second, he had just engineered for his museum the largest exhibition of Rembrandts ever assembled in the U. S. There were 78 paintings, ten of them owned in Detroit, many loaned by the nation's wealthiest private collectors --John Pierpont Morgan, Michael Friedsam, Charles M. Schwab, Jules Semon Bache, et al. Of another event-of-the-week Director Valentiner was prouder still. He was able to announce that, thanks to his own astute connoisseurship, his Detroit Institute of Art had acquired a genuine Titian, the golden, mellow portrait of a Venetian Doge. For this masterpiece, which he valued at $150,000, Director Valentiner had paid only $400, at an auction of part of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum's great Havemeyer Collection (TIME, March 24). It had been labeled "School of Titian," but Director Valentiner, observing the sensitively rendered fingers of the Doge's hand upon his sword hilt, gambled $400 and had an expert scrape off layers of 30-year-old overpaint. In his judgment that this was a real work of Titian he was soon joined by no less a master of the genuine picture market than Sir Joseph Duveen.

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