Art: The Big Collectors

From the suburban housewife who pinches her household money to collect dolls of all nations to the squillionaire* searcher of continents, collectors are a race apart. What distinguishes them, for good or ill, is the fact that they are not only possessors, but possessed.

Critic-Author Aline B. Saarinen (wife of Architect Eero Saarinen) makes the point in a study of great American collectors published this week (The Proud Possessors; Random House; $5.95): "Their overpowering common denominator is this: for each of them, the collecting of art was a primary means of expression."

Major U.S. collecting began with a rush in the 1890s, when a handful of new U.S. millionaires decided, almost as one, to plunge into the art market. They had little experience, but in a time before income taxes, huge spendable resources. They bought widely, and sometimes competitively with one another. In the space of a generation, Andrew Mellon, P.A.B. Widener, Henry Clay Frick, and lesser financial titans transformed the U.S. from a cultural have-not to a treasure house of great art that could rival Europe's best (see color pages).

Most of the early titans bought art as they bought stocks; they were interested only in authenticated masterpieces, the blue-chip established values of culture. Their successors were less lavish of necessity, but no less avid, and often supported American art, as their predecessors did not. Among Author Saarinen's gallery:

¶ J. Pierpont Morgan bought more than $60 million worth of art in the 20 years before his death in 1913, but he was no spendthrift. The same collection today might well command ten times what he paid for it. His Renaissance library is now one of Manhattan's handsomest small museums. Author Saarinen calls the place (36th Street and Madison Avenue) "restrained, not opulent; exquisite, not ostentatious. The East Room is regal with lapis lazuli columns flanking the fireplace and with a Flemish 16th century tapestry above it. What unconscious impulse of guilt or pride determined the choice of this particular weaving? It represents The Triumph of Avarice, and it includes one vandal stealing leaves of an illuminated manuscript."

¶ Mrs. Potter Palmer, was among the first to bring impressionist painting to America (in the 1890s) on the advice of a social equal who happened to be a great painter besides: Mary Cassatt. The wife of a millionaire Chicago hotelman and financier, Mrs. Palmer ruled wherever she chose to go: Newport, Paris, Rome. Invited to a party for the Infanta Eulalia of Spain, she firmly declined: "I cannot meet this bibulous representative of a degenerate monarchy." James McNeill Whistler remembered Rome as "a bit of an old ruin alongside of a railway station where I saw Mrs. Potter Palmer." But her picture-crammed castle ("English Gothic of the square-headed variety") on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago was Mrs. Palmer's favorite seat. "Adieu" she would tell friends in Paris. "I must go back to Chicago to give the Charity Ball."