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Twenty Issues per year $3

The Art Digest
THE NEWS MAGAZINE OF ART
Vol. XII   New York, N. Y., 1st July, 1938   No. 18

Los Angeles Freed

FREEDOM from politics came to the fine arts department of the Los Angeles Museum on June 3, when the Board of Supervisors adopted an ordinance establishing a new county department of history, science and arts and appointed an enlarged board of governors of 15 members as the controlling body. This move, advocated for years by Los Angeles art groups, gains all the advantages of self government which the attempted amendment to the State Constitution could have given had the voters passed it in the election of 1936.

Now, comments Arthur Millier of the Times, "if Los Angeles wants an art museum to match its civic greatness, co-operation should achieve it. This is the biggest local art news in years."

The board of governors, enlarged from nine to fifteen members, is now the actual governing body, guiding four separate departments, each having an expert director. Dr. William M. Hekking, for example, is director of the department of art. The fifteen governors are also the directors of a non-profit corporation, called Museum Associates, formed entirely separate from the museum and the county government. This corporation writes Millier, "is empowered to accept gifts in trust, thus, it is believed, overcoming past reluctance of art collectors  to donate to a politically controlled institution."

Action, said the Los Angeles Times in a front page news story, "came after Preston Harrison, retired Chicago businessman and art patron, and Attorney Howard Robertson, secretary of the Los Angeles Museum, appeared to place before the board plans of a non-profit group of Museum Associates to acquire art at no cost to taxpayers." Mr. Harrison also recommended purchase of a plot of land on Wilshire Boulevard for expansion of the Otis Art Institute into "an eventual new art school and gallery, to cost about $200,000 and to give Los Angeles one of the greatest art institutes in the world." Mr. Harrison, donor of several American and French modern collections to the museum, has been on the directorate for 17 years. 

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