Art: Americans Abroad

Paintings by modern Americans, increasingly sought and sold by Europe's private galleries and collectors, are beginning to trickle into a few big public European museums. For its first work by an American of any period, the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo last week got a wistful and lyric portrait called Albert's Son, by Andrew Wyeth, perhaps the most commercially successful of serious U.S. artists. At the other end of the artistic spectrum, the Tate Gallery in London announced that as the first work to be hung in its new American Wing it had acquired a swirly 1949 abstraction by the late Jackson Pollock, who is still the unsurpassed master of the "drip method." In neither case did the museums have to dip into native funds. The Wyeth was a gift of former U.S. Ambassador to Norway L. Corrin Strong. The Pollock was bought with money donated by Pickle and Soup Tycoon Henry J. Heinz II through the American Friends of the Tate, of which Ambassador John Hay ("Jock") Whitney is president.