SAN DIEGO — It's huge. It's American. It's expensive. Samuel F.B. Morse's mighty "Gallery of the Louvre" will arrive at the Timken Art Gallery in Balboa Park for a six-week exhibition beginning Oct. 1. The painting is on loan from the Terra Museum of American Art in Evanston, Ill.
Painted in 1833, the 6-by-9-foot canvas follows the tradition of European "gallery pictures" in depicting a scene in the Salon Carre of the Louvre with at least 42 paintings by masters such as Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt lining the wall as visitors admire the art.
For the Record
Los Angeles Times Friday September 27, 1985 San Diego County Edition Calendar Part 6 Page 10 Column 2 Entertainment Desk 1 inches; 33 words Type of Material: Correction
The dates of the San Diego Symphony's Oktoberfest listed in Wednesday's Artswatch column were incorrect. The events of the Oktoberfest, which will be primarily in Balboa Park's Spreckels Organ Pavilion, are scheduled for Oct. 24-27.
In 1982 the painting was acquired by Daniel J. Terra, founder of the Terra Museum, for $3.25 million, the highest price ever paid for a painting by an American artist.
Samuel Finley Breese Morse is primarily known as the inventor of the telegraph and the Morse code. But he studied art with Washington Allson and Benjamin West, and hoped to increase American art appreciation in part through his paintings. "Gallery of the Louvre" was conceived as a sort of touring portable museum and compendium of great art. Ironically, the painting was in storage at Syracuse University most of the years between 1884 and its purchase in 1982. The painting, which will be on view through Nov. 17, is part of the Timken's 20th-anniversary celebration. It is the second Terra loan exhibited by the museum, Charles Courtney Curran's "Lotus Lillies" having appeared here in 1982.
ROSTAND/DICKENS: Two respected regional theaters bearing classical gifts will pay us a visit within one month of each other. The Syracuse Stage Company will stage Edmond Rostand's "Cyrano de Bergerac" at the East County Performing Arts Center at 8 p.m. on Oct. 19. Actor John Cullum, a Tony Award winner in the musicals "Shenandoah" in 1975 and "On the 20th Century" in 1978, will star. Cullum is host on the Arts and Entertainment cable program "Victorian Days." Director for "Cyrano" is Arthur Storch, the Syracuse Stage Company's producing director.
On Nov. 15, Minneapolis' Guthrie Theatre's principal acting company will arrive at the Mandeville Auditorium--not the Mandell Weiss Center--at UC San Diego for an 8 p.m. performance of Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations." Barbara Field has directed, and rumors are that the production is very much along the lines of the Royal Shakespeare's production . . . but much more abridged.
T.G.I. FREITAG: The San Diego Symphony's Oktoberfest returns for the second year Thursday through Sunday, this time at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. Repeating from last year will be the hit 38-piece Bergholz German Band from Niagara Falls, N.Y. Events include Thursday's $25 per person Hacker-Pschorr Brewery Preview Party at 6:30 p.m., Friday's Horton Plaza noon Oktoberfest concert and "T.G.I. Freitag" beer blast and ceremonial keg tapping at 5 p.m. at the pavilion ($4 admission). Then on Saturday will be the fourth annual Quarternote Classic 10K fun run, walk, bicycle and wheelchair race. Primary Oktoberfest activities take place in the pavilion from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, the latter day's festivities being a salute to San Diego's German-American community.
MUSICAL HOSTS: Jeannie Miller and Terry Wilson, local hosts for "PM Magazine," are out at KFMB-TV, where "ratings have been eroding." Miller, a bubbly blonde personality, had been the Channel 8 co-host for five years, but Wilson had barely made it through one year since replacing Mark Walton in June, 1984. Nationally, the program, which focuses on interesting people and trends, has been losing ratings points, according to Channel 8 executive producer Roland Morales.
"Because of the numbers, there was a need for a change," Morales said. "Part of it is the burn-out factor." The Miller-Wilson show's final segment is Friday.
On Monday, two "PM Magazine" hosts from the Midwest take over. They are Dave Hood, recently of Oklahoma City's KTVY, with an acting credit in a soon-to-be-released NBC Movie of the Week dubbed "Pigs and Freaks," and Pat Brown, a magna cum laude graduate of American University and former Miss West Virginia. Morales says the pair will give the show a true Southern California look. We can expect to see the people next door involved in action-adventure stories.
QUOTE AD: Lamb's Players Theatre turned a theater manager's nightmare into a stroke of marketing brilliance last week when it ran a quarter-page quote ad in The Reader. The ad contained criticism lifted from the universally negative reviews of Lamb's production of Graham Greene's "The Potting Shed" ("Wan, confused, pointless, boring, abominable travesty, dogmatic gibberish.") along with the comment: "Audiences Disagree." Readers were invited to call, cite the ad and receive two free tickets to the show. The only catch was that they had to fill out an opinion questionnaire on the performance they saw, the results of which will be printed in this week's Reader.
