Buffalo Bronzes

Melt copper with tin and you get bronze, probably the oldest, certainly one of the most useful alloys in the world. Last week the Albright Art Gallery of Buffalo popped into the spotlight with an exhibition illustrating the history of bronze-casting from about 3000 B.C. to the 20th Century. Eschewing such utilitarian objects as Roman swords, motorboat propellers and bank tellers' cages, the gallery has assembled a collection of 173 statuettes, all of them of first rank, only one (a Degas figurine) the property of the Albright Art Gallery. Most liberal lenders were New York's Metropolitan Museum, which offered 33 pieces, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which loaned 26. Such private collectors as John Pierpont Morgan, Jules Semon Bache, William Randolph Hearst, George Blumenthal, Mrs. John Davison Rockefeller Jr. chipped in, too.

Best of Buffalo's bronzes: two owls dated approximately 1122 B.C.; a gilt Buddha whose first private owner, the Empress Dowager's Viceroy Tuan Fang, acquired it by building a brand new temple for the monks who had guarded it; a group of Renaissance pieces from the Dreyfus collection, just bought by Andrew Mellon for his new national museum (TIME, Jan. 11); two Benvenuto Cellinis; David with the Head of Goliath, only known bronze by Luca della Robbia beside his famed doors for the Florence Cathedral; the earliest of six known figures by Daumier of "Ratapoil," his famed caricature of a Bonapartist agitator.

If the Albright Gallery had nothing of its own to match these in quality there was at least one other public service it could perform. It published an elaborate catalog illustrating each piece with a full-page plate and giving a scholarly introduction to each section of the catalog. These were not prepared by the Buffalo Museum's staff but by leading authorities in the U. S. on each particular field. Orientalist Arthur Upham Pope wrote on Persian bronzes, the Metropolitan's Gisela M. A. Richter covered those of Greece and Rome, Art Dealer Stephan Bourgeois wrote on modern bronzes.

Footing the bill for all this was one of the leading squash racquet and polo players in the U. S., Seymour Horace Knox. Son of a Woolworth partner and a potent investment banker in his own right, Poloist Knox has a burning ambition to make East Aurora and the Buffalo district as famed for polo as Long Island. He was captain of the squash racquets team sent to Britain in 1935. His active interest in art is recent. To date his private collection consists of one Utrillo bought a few months ago, and the collector's bug.

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