Art: With Taste & Money

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On public view in Manhattan this week were two of the U.S.'s finest private collections of art:

¶ At Knoedler's, a show called "A Collector's Taste" displayed 24 of the best paintings owned by Manhattan Industrialist Stephen Carlton Clark (Singer sewing machines), longtime trustee of the Metropolitan Museum. Unlike many private collections, which tend to second-rate paintings by first-rate artists, the Clark show contained only jewels. Among the most brilliant: Vincent Van Gogh's great, glowing Le Cafe de Nuit, done in heavy, vibrant greens, yellows and reds; Rembrandt's beatific St. James, in which the praying saint appears surrounded by a holy presence; El Greco's bearded, cross-bearing St. Andrew, done in contrasting hues of grey, blue and green. The El Greco, now shown in the U.S. for the first time, is one of the most important acquisitions made since the war by a U.S.

collector: Clark bought it last month through a dealer from a collector in Munich.

¶ In four of the Metropolitan Museum's sumptuously renovated picture galleries, an impressive selection from the huge Lehman collection of Italian, Dutch, Flemish, German, Spanish and French paintings and Renaissance furniture was grandly laid out. Now the property of Robert Lehman (investment banking), the collection was started by his father, the late Financier Philip Lehman in 1911, is resplendent with Italian primitives and notable examples of the work of Memling, Holbein. El Greco, Rembrandt, Goya, and latter-day Frenchmen like Cézanne and Renoir. One of the show's standouts: Botticelli's tiny, delicate Annunciation, which Robert Lehman bought as a birthday present for his father in 1929. There are also two beautiful Madonnas: one by Giovanni Bellini shows a poignantly pensive Mary in a rich, blue robe, supporting a standing Infant Christ; the other, called The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, is by the Flemish artist Adriaen Isenbrant, who has painted a weary Madonna with delicately shadowed eyes.