From the Birdie's Nest

Manhattan's pioneering Museum of Modern Art last week took a plunge. Conservative U. S. art museums have dipped condescendingly into the art of photography, buying an occasional print to store in their basements, sandwiching an occasional show of fine photographs between their Cezannes and Rembrandts. None of them has ever rated photographs high enough to give them a full-fledged department, complete with curators and permanent collections. But the Modern Museum, which had long been flirting with camera art, last week announced that it would give photography a large, permanent place alongside its departments of painting, sculpture, architecture, industrial design.

As curator of the new department, the Modern Museum appointed its librarian, scholarly, gangling Camera Expert Beaumont Newhall.

For its maiden exhibition, this week, the Modern Museum's new photography department dusted off 60 pictures representing the heavy cream of camera craft, from early sepia-colored 19th-Century primitives down to such contemporary camerartists as Alfred Stieglitz. Ansel Adams, Edward Weston. Picked to show the tremendous variety of methods and subjects used by cameramen of the past 97 years, the exhibition contained prints from hoary calotype* and wet-plate negatives, documentaries by the Civil War's camerace Matthew Brady, sentimental Victorian landscapes, modern news photographs, dadaist shadowgraphs by Hungarian-born Moholy-Nagy and U. S. Modernist Man Ray. Surprised visitors found that some of photography's finest workmanship was very old stuff.

The man behind the Modern Museum's new photographic venture is David H. McAlpin, grandnephew of the late John D. Rockefeller Sr. A precise-minded shutterbug who clicked his first camera in 1906, balding, snap-eyed Mr. McAlpin spends many a spare moment from his Manhattan brokerage business getting fragments of the world on film. A collector of fine and rare photographs, McAlpin has long felt that U. S. museums ought to do more for photography. When, a year ago, he gave Manhattan's stodgy Metropolitan Museum $1,000 to buy photographs, the Metropolitan's board of trustees had to hold a meeting to decide whether photography was art. They finally decided that it was, accepted his gift. Cousin Nelson Rockefeller's Museum of Modern Art was prompter. About his own camera work, Camerarchivist McAlpin is shy. Says he: "It's mostly in the snapshot stage."

* Early paper negative used before the introduction of glass plates or film.

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