Art: COLLECTOR'S PRIZE

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HOW long has this been going on?" asked the late advertising tycoon Albert Davis Lasker (onetime head of Lord & Thomas), one afternoon in 1943. Before him, set up on easels in Manhattan's Wildenstein galleries, stood a $70,000 Gauguin and a $45,000 Renoir. For the man who made such products as Lucky Strike, Palmolive, Pepsodent, Kleenex and Kotex into household words, the world of art was opening. On hand to coach and whet his appetite was his wife Mary, who had majored in art at Radcliffe, gone on to help run a Manhattan gallery.

Adman Lasker at 64 plunged into the market, convinced that the world of advertising art had all along been drawing its ideas from the prime originators of modern painting. In the next eight years he amassed a spectacular collection ranging from an 1834 Corot to a 1950 Joán Miró. The results, shown by the 60 color plates of The Albert D. Lasker Collection (Simon & Schuster; $20), make one of the handsomest art books of the season.

The painter Lasker selected as "the man I'll bet on" was Matisse; his collection has nine Matisse oils, and he hedged his hunch by buying eleven Picassos and four Braques. Endowed with a natural flair for color and design, Lasker was delighted to find that his eye automatically picked out the best of the lots shown him by dealers. He also discovered: "One not only has to pay the highest prices, but also a premium for the privilege of paying the highest prices."

Lasker's last major purchase before his death in 1952 was one of his happiest: Vincent van Gogh's White Roses (opposite). Along with its companion piece on the same subject, owned by New York's Governor Averell Harriman, it is one of the most serene, glowing and untroubled canvases Van Gogh ever painted. It carries with it Van Gogh's sense of joyous (though temporary) release from an attack of madness that the painter described when he wrote to his brother from Saint-Rémy two months before his suicide: "That horrible attack has disappeared like a storm, and I work with calm and steady ardor to do a few last things here."