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12 The Texas Observer MEETINGS THE THURSDAY CLUB of Dallas meets each the Downtown YMCA, 605 No. Ervay St., Dallas. Good discussion. You’re welcome. Informal, no dues. The TRAVIS COUNTY LIBERAL DEMO-CRATS meet at the City Health Auditorium, 1313 Sabine, at 8 p.m. on the first Thursday. You’re invited. ITEMS for this feature cost, for the first entry, 7c a word, and for each subsequent entry, 5c a word. We must receive them one week before the date of the issue in which they are to ba published. PICASSO IN FORT WORTH Fort Worth In a few moments, a puff of sweet music drifted up the gentle slope of Amon Carter Square from the Coliseum and rodeo compound. The contest emcee’s voice` came out loudly after it, over the acres of parked cars and the darkened Art Center building. “The winner of the semi-finals in bronc riding is Freckles Brown of Soper, Oklahoma!” Then the voice quieted and some bleary whoops exuded from the compound as aproned tenders parked some late arriving cars on the tarred slope. A 2×6 barrier closed the little driveway leading up to the. Art Center’s main entrance. It was a warm and lavender evening._ The_ interior of the galleries was quiet and dim. Manila linen curtains were drawn at the windows. I drove up to the back of the Art Center on Montgomery Street which rises above the ground floors of the adjoined Scott Theater and the center where, below, across the bland coral cheese face of the building, lay the sloping drain to the Trinity. The lights of the yellow colosseum blinked. Freckles had just made some four-thousand-odd dollars, more cash than Sam Houston made in his first year in office. I walked down into the gardened entrance to the center’s rooms. The University of Tetras’ Ida Kar exhibit of photos was stacked , across the back wall of the fifth gallery. Carrol Lee, the exhibit’s designer, was pacing with a cup of coffee, conspicuously concerned about the hang Timothy S. Pope is a native of Providence, R.I., whq, after living and being educated in Connecticut and New York, moved to Fort Worth four years ago, where he resides with his wife, and nine children. Mr. Pope has studied painting and sculpture and has, in recent years, become interested in writing and photography. He is a motion picture scriptwriter for an aircraft factory. The incident he describes occurred earlier this year. Timothy S. Pope ing of more than one hundred seventyfive Picassos which would need be on the wall under bright lights for the mildly-liquored prolusion to begin in forty-odd hours. The walls were plank, damp with new latex. The Mazda lighting would need to be installed. In small, limed maple frames the one-hundred-piece Suite Vollard, bought by the museum last summer through the Westbrook Hotel builder Benjamin J. Tiller’s trust rimmed the baseboard of a curving gallery. Seventyfive watercolors, gouaches, and drawings were similarly stored in another. It was eight o’clock. “And that’s not all of it, either,” Carrol said, thumb-pressing his moustache. “There’s a sixty-six-piece Duncan photo exhibit for the performance gallery as well. The Private World thing.” “When will you hang’ that?” I asked. “I should think about nine tonight. It’s all right. Take any pictures you want.” I had taken the camera out of the bag and mounted it on the tripod. But they did not hang the Duncan photos until the next day. The pace was agonizing and slow. Sam Cantey III, executive vice-president of the Fort Worth Art Assn., was sitting in a fiberglass scoop chair jauking with some gilt paste at the corner of a chipped frame which held a Picasso female head. After a moment, he put down the cloth, crossed the room to speak with Don Burrows, the new director of the center, and then placed a call to New York City. He spoke with a woman. “At the moment we have eighty thousand in hand and in income for the year. We can count on that. But it won’t be enough. If that’s what we’re to bid with, Fort Worth won’t be in the sale. Now, we’ve got to raise twenty-five more. I think a hundred and five thousand would put us in a good position, don’t you? We’ve raised about half of that so far. If you’d like to contribute, please let us know. Give my best to your husband. Have a good drink. Have a good supper. I think we have an excellent chance to get what we want.” He was speaking of the C.R.I.A. auction to be held the next afternoon at twothirty, during which Picasso’s personally owned Femme Couchee Lisant would be brought to the block for the first internationally-telecast auction ever held. Almost blatantly, the $105,000, the highest price ever called at a Picasso auction, the exact ultimate sum which Cantey would raise, would bring to Fort Worth an enriched fable from the master for its walls. WHEN C.R.I.A. \(the Committee to donate a work for sale by auction for their benefit, they launched one of the most ambitious sales of its kind ever held. Picasso was delighted. From the office presided over honorarily by Jacqueline Kennedy, came word to Ric Brown, director of the southwest division of this newly-formed group to aid the city of Florence, devastated by flood, that the grounds for communal auction should be set. Picasso sent on the fifty-one-by-seventy-six inch reclining nude to Paris’ Petit Palais where under the care of Sotheby of London, it traveled to New York City, Los Angeles, more recently to Fort Wirth and Dallas, and then back to New York City for the final auctioning by Peter Wilson, chairman of the board of Park Benet, agents ‘for Sotheby’s. As Femme Couchee Lisant came into the Texas prairie, Petit Palais and Grand Palais, holding twin showings of Picasso, were in full commemoration of the !phantasmagoric master and his eighty-fifth-year ,. Speculation on the painting was running high. Cantey was right. With New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, and Dallas to bid against, the kitty would have to be fat and promising. Cantey had no sooner, hung up from the New York City call than the .phone rang. Then, when he had answered and listened: “No, I’m sorry. This is not An art store. You have the wrong number,” He listened to the caller’s demands. “This is a museum, not an art supply. . . Well, if I. were you, I would go to such an such’s on Camp Bowie. If you don’t mind, I’m calling out long distance. Yes. Good-bye.” He placed that call and Douglas Cooper arrived, tapping on the glass to be let in. He is the curator the peripatetic shepherd of the twin Picasso shows. A plump, erect, and sagging man, he wore checked trousers, a navy blazer covering a very blue shirt with detachable white collar. His hair is wiry gray sprouting from a shiny Welsh brow. He carried an umbrella and a fine blood-brown briefcase. Cantey was on the phone again. He greeted Cooper who put down his things and lit a Gauloises. Cantey finished the call, visibly marked with his funding success. “Well, well, you’re here.” “Yes, it went fine. We’ve been in rehearsal since eleven.” He sighed and patted his side. His speech is predominantly British, yet has a European cadence and tone. In a whisper he said: “You’d think with all the preparation they’d have the right shirt for me. . . . They’re so goddamn efficient they forgot to tell me blue shirt for the camera. By the way, I must call the studio.” He lit another cigarette and Cantey handed him the phone. “I’ve lost the catalogue for the show.” He told the studio it was blue near the chair near the camera. “The only existing copy.” WBAP assured him