HUGE ‘GALLERY OF LOUVRE’ DUE IN S.D.

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.

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.

“We didn’t believe the show was as bad as the reviews said, and every one has been horrible, awful,” said Robert Smyth, Lamb’s managing director. He decided to capitalize on the negative. “We had more than 140 calls from the ad and had to sort of turn people away,” Smith said.

As for the questionnaire, “It has been very positive. I didn’t expect it to be so one-sided.” How favorable was it? “Ninety-nine percent of the people said ‘yes’ to the question ‘Would you recommend this show to others?’ ”

GALLERY GAB: If you’re kind of iffy about contemporary art but would like to learn more about it, local galleries and museums are more than willing to help out. To that end the Patty Aande Gallery downtown will offer an informal discussion with Los Angeles artist Paul Knotter at 4 p.m. Saturday. Aande is exhibiting a show of Knotter’s paintings and drawings. . . . For a price, one can learn from several speakers at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art or the San Diego Museum of Art. The La Jolla museum’s six-part lecture series, “Focus on the Permanent Collection” with modern art historian Sally Yard, continues through Dec. 2. On Tuesday muralist Judy Baca will be the first in a lecture series co-sponsored by UC San Diego entitled “Context as Frame: Contemporary Strategies.” . . . The San Diego Museum of Art offers its Meet the Masters lecture series and Balboa Lecture Series, which provide information on current and upcoming exhibitions and other art subjects by utilizing local and visiting experts. Sir Robin Mackworth-Young opens the Balboa series Oct. 17, speaking about the Royal Collection of Drawings and Watercolors at Windsor Castle.