Collectors7 Item

The impressive art collection of John Hay ("Jock") Whitney was recently featured in the quality bimonthly magazine Art in America. But millionaire Whitney does not confine his collecting to art alone. His latest acquisition: An in America magazine.

Last week the Whitney Communications Corporation reached agreement with Art in America's Lee Ault to buy (for an undisclosed amount) its first wholly-owned publication since the New York Herald Tribune sank more than two years ago.

Healthy Circulation. Art in America was launched as the nation's first scholarly art magazine in 1913. When New York art collector Lee Ault took it over in 1957, the magazine's circulation was down to a floundering 1,300. Ault poured in capital and promotion expertise, enlarged the format to 9 by 12 made liberal use of four-color repro -ductions and attracted new advertisers and readers. Today the magazine has a circulation of 41,000, healthy for a fine-arts publication.

With its superior color reproduction the tasteful, calcum-textured Art in America is easily the handsomest in its field. Editor (since 1940) Jean Lipman has geared the magazine more to the intellectual currents in art—its new forms, trends and concepts—than to news of exhibitions and galleries, the focus of its main competitors, Art News (circulation 38,600) and Arts Magazine (29,000).

While past and present American art is its chief concern, Art in America often ranges to such diverse subjects as Japan's "Gutai Group," crewelwork as art, fakes and forgeries.

Despite his Herald Tribune disaster,.Whitney never got completely out of publishing. His corporation has long owned three other publications: Parade, a newspaper Sunday supplement; Harvest Years, a monthly for the retired; and Interior Design, a trade journal for interior decorators. Whitney Communications is also the controlling stockholder in the Paris-based International Herald Tribune.

But Whitney, who personally oversaw operations at the New York Trib, turned his interests away from publishing in the wake of its demise. His latest purchase invites speculation that the mourning period is over.