In this hall—named for Charles H. Morrill, Nebraskan who did a great deal for the university—you may saunter and look, and look and saunter. The art galleries are in the two top rooms, the museum on the two below. Dwight Kirsch of the university art department caught this particular slant of sun into the upper art gallery.
Like the native Chicagoan who never heard of Hull House, we know too little about what we have at our own doors. The Nebraska art association has built up a fine collection of paintings. Each year it holds an exhibit, and the fact that it buys one or more pictures every year brings in a collection worth inspecting. The late Mr. and Mrs. F. M. Hall of Lincoln bequeathed their collection to the university, also a fund for further purchases.
Among the valuable paintings by modern artists owned by the art association are the late Grant Wood’s “Arnold Comes of Age,” one of Thomas Hart Benton’s vigorous paintings, “Lonesome Road” and John Steuart Curry’s “Roadmender’s Camp.”
No. 25—Morrill Hall Entrance
Most impressive, perhaps, of the many interesting rooms in the Morrill museum—two lower floors of Morrill hall—is Elephant hall. In this quiet room time yawns, and down her great throat one sees the endless vista of the years. Here animals of all eras, usually clad only in their bones, confront one. If you are sensitive to the ghostly whispers of the past you might well bring a companion. To span millions of years alone in an afternoon is too much; the winds between as the centuries whirl are too vigorous.
Last Saturday we gazed, alone we believed, at a beautiful pair of albino coyotes (Wheeler county, Nebraska, 1940) with touching blue eyes; at a Peruvian mummy (pre-Inca)—a baby with its little skull resting on moth eaten arms; at the skeleton of a dawn horse, no higher than your knee, dug up in Sioux county, and were kneeling intent before a reconstructed dodo when we turned suddenly and encountered the saturnine eye of the ever present guard.
Rightly, the museum takes no chances. Elephant hall contains one of the best collections of modern and fossil elephants in the world, and in addition real or reconstructed animals of many ages. Backgrounds for these reassembled bones of animals which sniffed the earth when it was new were painted in delicate tints by Elizabeth Dolan. The late Gutzon Borglum, stepping into Elephant hall in a woolly camelskin coat, stopped in his tracks among the ancient bones and murmured paradoxically and appreciatively, “A new world.”
One of the activities of the museum has been research on the antiquity of man in North America. Many discoveries have been made in Nebraska, and one of the few existing collections of Yuma-Folsom artifacts is to be found here.