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The Washington Post
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1972

Raising the Corcoran Question
By Paul Richard
Point of View

Last Friday's bizarre and bloody altercation at the Corcoran Gallery of Art has raised a lot of questions. They remain unanswered. 
  
Will the men involved--Vincent Melzac, the Corcoran's chief executive, and Gene Baro, the gallery's director--reach some sort of mutually acceptable accommodation? Will the trustees act? Will reprimands be issued, will resignations be requested? Baro returned to work earlier this week, sporting five stitches and a black eye.
  
These questions tend to merge. What is to become of the Corcoran Gallery of Art?
  
Amid these many doubts, there is only one thing certain: The timing of the incident, which involved fisticuffs and hard words at a gallery cocktail party, could not have been less fortunate. For though the museum's chronic problems have not all been resolved, the staff today is working harder and the galleries today look better than they have in years.
  
Baro's staff is small, his budget is not opulent, but since he joined the Corcoran last April, he has managed to install nearly 40 exhibitions.
  
That seems to me to be a remarkable achievement.
  
Handsome upstairs galleries, long used as dusty storerooms, have been cleaned up and reopened. Works of art, in storage for years, have been placed on exhibition. The shows now change so often, that the gallery looks different almost every week, and all of this activity has been noticed by the public. Fan letters are regularly received.
  
Baro gladly shares the credit with the staff, but in this, his first museum director's job, he has already proved himself a skillful gallery technician.
  
Vincent Melzac was hired to cut costs by streamlining the Corcoran's cumbersome administration. He's done that. He was hired to raise money. Though lots of it is needed, the Corcoran is still poor.
  
The gossip swirling through the art world has focused on the men involved, on egos, enemies and faults. But the Corcoran is a museum, a service institution, and--as long as it's not crippled--the temperaments of its officials may be less important than the objects on display.
  
Some are brilliant, some are lousy.
  
The efficiency and energy of Baro and his staff are everywhere apparent. But the shows that he's installed are of a quality so varied, it is still difficult to gauge his vision and his taste.
  
Look, for instance, at the two exhibits currently on view.
  
One includes the works of 48  local artists, all of whom are members of the Washington

See CORCORAN, B6, Col. 1


Reviewing the Corcoran

CORCORAN, From B1

Chapter of the Artists Equity Association.
  
The other is the Sally Hazelet Drummond retrospective (and it was among these subtle color paintings that, on Friday night, during a photographic session, hostile words were being exchanged between Baro and Melzac.
  
The Drummond show is Baro's. Of the shows that he's installed, many have been canned, but this one is clearly his. Sally Drummond is an artist whose works he's long admired, whose works few of us have seen. 
  
She's very good. With countless stippled dots of carefully chosen color she constructs quiet abstract pictures that at first glimpse seem somber, then appear to glow. Unlike the early pictures of Washington's Howard Mehring, whose dapplings were moister, whose colors were less somber, Drummond's 1958 pictures are not pure "all-over" paintings. Their radiances and darkness tend to gather at their centers. California's Robert Irwin has explored a comparable technique, but his pictures were less dense. 
  
I mention Mehring and Irwin here because the Corcoran [[text illegible]] tance. Baro, who [[text illegible]] Mrs. Drummond's paintings are at one with the best in contemporary color abstraction," has tried to do something of the sort with this 14-year retrospective. 
  
The Artists Equity exhibition is a very different kind of show.
  
Artists Equity describes itself as "a national organization for professional fine artists." It's not a union, but an apolitical service organization. Though it was founded 25 years ago it is neither powerful nor large. 
  
It lobbies for tax reform (a collector who gives a work to a museum can deduct its market price; if a painter gives his work he can deduct only the cost of his materials. Artists Equity feels that is wrong.) It offers artists legal advice, copyright information, sample contrasts, it warns them about frauds and tells them about competitions. 
  
Though there are 48 local artists in it, the present show (which was selected by a museum man from Columbia, S. C., and which will travel to nine Southeastern museums) is not a first-rate survey of the best Washington art. 
  
Much of the work is amateurish. Though some well-known names are here (Jacob Kainen, James Twitty, Alma Thomas, Robert Gates), of the artists represented, many are unknown. Some will remain unknown, and deserve their anonymity, but there are others, such as John Winslow, who does not have a gallery, whose pictures should be more widely seen. 
  
Baro has installed many shows less fine that that of Sally Drummond. If the Corcoran had more money, he might well have screened them with a finer sieve. I did not much like the Irish show presently on view, and the Artists Equity exhibition didn't snow me, but I am glad I saw them. 
  
The Corcoran Biennial that Baro is planning for next spring will be devoted to the theme of color. Perhaps he will convince us then of his insight and his vision. For many reasons, some financial, some beyond his personal control, he has not yet fully done so. "The Corcoran should reflect the art world, it need not put an imprimatur on everything it shows," he says. 
  
But there is no doubt that in the past few months he's brought the Corcoran alive.
  
The trustees will probably not act until George Hamilton, their chairman, returns in a week or so from Europe. Baro and Melzac reportedly have not made peace and communicate by memo. Their future at the Corcoran thus remains uncertain, but in terms of temporary exhibitions the museum that they guide now is the liveliest in town.