Plaut's Root

Through the streets of Boston last fortnight clip-clopped a horse ridden by a Negro wearing a ballet costume and a red wig. The plug, advertising the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (see p. 38), was the bright idea of one of the brightest of young U. S. Museum directors: lanky, fair-haired James Sachs Plaut, of Boston's Institute of Modern Art. Smart Jim Plaut, 28, had arranged for the Institute to sponsor the opening of the Ballet, and to pocket any thing the box office took over $3,000. The Institute pocketed $1,000.

When the performance was over, most of the audience and some of the ballerinas trooped to Back Bay to view a top-notch art exhibit--78 paintings by Georges Rouault--and the Institute's new home at No. 210 Beacon St. The guests, queued up in the street and taxing the energies of the ushers (Harvard footballers), packed three floors of the building, sipped hot bouillon and champagne punch, saw more of each other than of the pictures.

Boston's Institute, nursed from its founding by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, was weaned two winters ago, a year after Jim Plaut became its director. A Harvardman (1933), he took art as a snap course. Since then Jim Plaut has had two great ambitions: to get permanent quarters for the Institute; to put on the first big Rouault show in the U. S. The quarters he got from Mrs. Joel Goldthwait, mother of Nathaniel Saltonstall (first cousin of Governor-re-elect Leverett Saltonstall), who is the Institute's president and Boston's most eligible bachelor. She handed over her five-story house with no strings. Director Plaut would have liked to raise $25,000 to remodel it, but the war held him down. He settled for $4,000, contributed by Institute members, painted the red brick front grey, the front door bright blue, the interior pale blue. He lighted it by fluorescent indirect lamps.

Mild-looking, baldish Georges Rouault, who was born in a bomb shelter during the Paris Commune, is now 69, is presumably living and working in occupied France, perhaps in Paris, where he holds a sinecure as director of a museum full of fairy-tale paintings by his teacher, Academician Gustave Moreau. Today a good Rouault costs about $3,500. For the Institute's Rouault show, Director Plaut was unable to import any paintings from Europe, or even to borrow one from the late exhibition at the New York World's Fair. He collected his show from U. S. museums and private owners, including Showman Billy Rose, and Actor Edward G. Robin son, who sent lengthy telegraphic suggestions about the lighting.

The Institute's Rouaults, ranging back to 1891, showed the pious painter's long preoccupation with circus clowns, tortured Christs, brutal judges, violent nudes, all painted in slashes of black, and brilliant, jewel-like reds, blues, greens which recalled Rouault's early apprenticeship to a stained-glass worker. Boston's plushiest Brahmins viewed the paintings with no murmur of disapprobation, even for a wrenched, very nude Red-Haired Woman, which was one of the high points of the show. Boston's Sanity in Art Society kept mum. Thus had James Sachs Plaut put critics to rout.

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