Art: Double Loss

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The son of a Cleveland interior designer, Rorimer combined a taste for architecture and a liking for the decorative arts. As a boy, he made a candlestick on his own lathe; as a freshman at Harvard ('27), he had already begun collecting rare Rhodian pottery. At the Met, he became a medieval specialist, presided over the Cloisters, a priceless museum, literally from the ground up: Rorimer preceded the masons by building gunnysack forms to guide them. At the time of his death he was planning the new $5,000,000 American wing.

Bigger Game. For a scholar and administrator, Rorimer revealed an unexpected flair for showmanship and a love for cloak-&-dagger art sleuthing. During World War II, he was decorated for ferreting out the caches where the Nazis had hidden their art loot, proudly boasted that he was the first Allied offi cer to enter the Louvre upon the liberation of Paris. As director of the Met, he relished prowling galleries for finds, made auction history when he bought Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer for a record $2,300,000 with a wink. Last March he went to London to watch the bidding for St. George and the Dragon, was only momentarily crestfallen when it went to the National Gallery; his real game in Europe was a much bigger, and still unconsummated purchase.

Occasionally his sense of showmanship swept him overboard. Asked recently if the bust of a woman purported to be after Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra di Benci, which the Met bought at a Parke-Bernet auction for $225, was really a Leonardo, Rorimer winced, said, "If you never see it exhibited in the Met, you will know it is not."

Oysters & Bequests. At home with his wife Kay, he preferred to relax with slippers and pipe, thumb through old auction catalogues. Occasionally he turned cook, entertained friends with gourmet Chinese dinners, including a sauce that he maintained had 99 ingredients.

There, he had hung a colored reproduction of the Met's 15th century Flemish Merode altarpiece as a souvenir of one of his grandest coups. In 1957 he had the pleasure of propping up the original in his tapestry-hung office, while King Baudouin was trying to keep the masterpiece in Belgium. What the King did not know was that the horse had long since left the barn; the triptych that the art experts thought was the original was only a dimly lit copy.

No matter how exhausted, he knew that success depended on attention to details large and small. Asked once what he had accomplished at the end of one tiring day, he sighed and replied: "I have just come from eating oysters in front of an open fire with two elderly ladies." Then, brightening, he added: "They will one day make a very handsome bequest to the Met."