File avant-garde/avant-garde.0503, message 11


From: "lauf-s" <lauf-s-AT-quondam.com>
To: <avant-garde-driftline.org-AT-lists.driftline.org>
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 12:22:55 -0500
Subject: [a-g] Versailles, sigh


or Welcome to Suburbobliviopolis
http://www.quondam.com/24/2429.htm

food for thought:
In the panic after Pearl Harbor, German planes were reported nearing the
coast; the Boston Museum rushed its treasures out of sight. The National
Gallery in Washington very intelligently secured the vast empty Vanderbilt
chateau of Biltmore in the North Carolina mountains, to shelter the chief
masterpieces of the Mellon Collection. The Metropolitan first thought, on
the example of the National Gallery in London, of an abandoned mine or
quarry, and was on the point of taking one up the Hudson. Fortunately, the
prolonged drought during which they inspected it came to an end, and water
began to seep in just before they were to occupy it. Various empty country
houses were offered them. Soon they announced they had taken a country
place, "a hundred miles inland." It was Whitemarsh Hall [the quondam
Stotesbury Estate]. Priorities on materials were somehow secured; steel
racks for paintings were put up in the salon, steel shutters at the windows.
Packing cases were piled in the billiard and other rooms.

Other institutions sent their treasures there also, so that if a single bomb
had landed it would have destroyed them all. The hysterical rush to put
things in Whitemarsh Hall inspired Hardinge Scholle of the Museum of the
City of New York, who had at first participated in the movement, to call the
house a "monument hystérique."

--George and Mary Roberts, Triumph on Fairmount: Fiske Kimball and the
Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1959).

also
http://www.serianni.com/wh.htm

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