Art: Muriel's $12 Million Sublimation

For the Met, a spectacular collection from a Chicago matron

She liked to paint and so she painted.

Her family sent her to the city's conventional bastions of higher learning (the University of Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago) and Muriel Kallis painted on, even after her marriage to Jay Steinberg, a successful local businessman.

Lured by the glamour of New York City, the couple spent much time there in the years from 1950 to 1954. His interest was music, and he frequented the concert halls. Her interest was art, and she spent her evenings in The Club in Greenwich Village and other haunts of the then avant-garde New York School of painting. At the nearby Cedar Bar, Jackson Pollock caroused, Robert Motherwell discoursed, Willem de Kooning waxed disputatious. Her hair was blond, her figure svelte, her age happily indeterminate (actually mid-30s) and her artistic commitment impeccable. She was on their wave length. Franz Kline, who was perfecting a slashing, black-and-white action painting style, took her with him to study Ingres at the Met.

And she had some money: not big money but enough. And so she bought —not for high prices, but still important money in those days to those artists. She bought a painting that her friend Pollock called simply Number 28, for $3,000 (it is now worth $3 million). She paid de Kooning $2,700 for his 1949 canvas Attic (now worth up to $1.5 million). She bought Motherwells and Klines, as well as gentle canvases by Jack Tworkov, a Polish immigrant who had switched from figurative painting to abstract expressionism influenced by de Kooning. She bought Calders and Giacomettis, a Henry Moore bronze and Cornell boxes. At first she hung her own works next to her new acquisitions; then she took them down. "I realized that I wasn't making much of a statement," she recalls with cheery candor. "I'm a failed artist—there's no other way to describe it."

Over the next 25 years she acquired another husband, Albert Hardy Newman, a Chicago stockbroker and real estate developer. She also kept on picking up whatever paintings and art objects appealed to her: masks from Oceania, a phallic house post from Africa. She was not making investments. Explains one admirer: "She used her eyes rather than her ears." Says she: "I'm not really a collector. Buying art is really a sublimation for me."

For a noncollector, she assembled a spectacular collection. Last week Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman, Chicago matron and patron of the arts, announced that she would bequeath it all to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Current value: $12 million to $15 million. Met Director Philippe de Montebello described it as the greatest private collection of abstract expressionists in the world. The gift does not become final until after her death. But at 66, Newman is still active in the art world as a member of the Chicago Art Institute's committee on 20th century painting and sculpture and, just lately, as an honorary trustee of the Met. Says she of her bequest: "I hope they don't get it for a long time."