Collectors: A. Life of Involvement

Chicago probably has more collectors per capita than any other city in the U.S. And in Chicago, when a collector develops a taste for art, he is,likely to treat himself to gargantuan helpings. Walls full of it. Rooms full of it. When the rooms fill up, he will glass in the porch or build an annex. When these are full to the rafters, he simply buys another house.

The city's passionate possessors snap up everything from Chinese vases to French furniture, but the biggest and bounciest collections are those of contemporary art. Fanciers of today's —and tomorrow's—painting, sculpture, kinetics and whole environments wade into galleries with eyes, minds and checkbooks wide open. As a tour of Chicago's top half-dozen dazzling collections shows, a new generation of collectors, many of whom are self-made millionaires, are brashly pitting their taste and understanding of today's baffling art trends against the judgment of the future and backing their hunches to the hilt. Nothing is too optical, poptical or far out to be in their homes (see following color portfolio).

Champagne Evenings. The competition for the title of most venturesome art collector in Chicago is indeed formidable.*In the 1950s, it would undoubtedly have been awarded to an enthusiast of abstract expressionism, Muriel Neuman, who picked up her first major De Kooning for $2,000 in 1950, long before most New York collectors were taking the movement seriously. More recently, the nod would have gone to Arnold Maremont, 63, president of Maremont Corp., maker of mufflers and other auto parts. The muffler man's 300-piece collection, valued at $2,000,000, shines throughout his manor house in Winnetka, at corporate headquarters, and in Maremont's Arizona hideaway.

Though the Maremont collection includes three Leger pictures, three Hun-dertwassers, nine Dubuffets and 33 Klees, many of Maremont's most illustrious acquisitions are sculptures, among them Brancusi's mellifluous bronze Blonde Negress. Much of his art was bought on Maremont's twice-a-year buying trips to Europe. For many years, Maremont and his wife have been fixtures at the Venice Biennale, renting large boats and treating their 90-odd passengers to champagne evenings on the Grand Canal.

Mystery & Authority. Real. Estate Man Joseph Randall Shapiro, 63, president of the fledgling Museum of Contemporary Art (TIME, Nov. 3), is equally geared to the current scene. His private collection consists primarily of surrealist and brutalist works, about which he often writes and lectures (Francis Bacon's Man in the Blue Box, for example, was recently taken along to a Presbyterian church to illustrate a lecture on the existential human condition). Though Shapiro maintains that he has never paid more than $5,000 in cash for a painting (and seen some appreciate to as much as $60,000), he warns against the notion that art is merely a canny investment. For him, it has meant a "life of involvement. A full response to a work of art is a complex reaction between intuition, thought, knowledge and perception. For me, a painting has to have two things—mystery and authority." Rene Magritte's see-worthy Chant a"Amour is richly endowed with both.