Art: Dime-Store Santa

The two gentlemen from Washington’s National Gallery of Art had every reason to be jubilant as they left the Manhattan penthouse of Dime-Store Tycoon Samuel Kress that day in 1939, but they also had reason to wonder about Mr. Kress’s mood. “I feel,” said one, “as though we had just become his sons-in-law, and that he’s still not too sure of the marriage.” Small wonder. The marriage in question was Kress’s gift to the National Gallery of 416 paintings and 35 sculptures from his own beloved collection—the beginning of the biggest art giveaway program since the Palatine Electress Anna Maria Ludovica, a Medici, gave her family’s vast collection to the state of Tuscany.

Last week, when that program officially came to an end, the gallery was no longer the only museum to be grateful. Smaller Kress collections have gone to 18 other museums in the U.S., and last week all of these had some of their treasures on display at the National Gallery in honor of the program. It was a dazzling show, the quality of which can be measured by the brooding Giovanni Bellini from the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City (see color). In further commemoration, the Phaidon Press has published a handsome book on the Kress Collection with text by Professor Charles Seymour Jr. of Yale (Art Treasures for America; $12.50). It is the curtain raiser for the complete seven-volume catalogue still to come.

As Good as the Count’s. The life of Samuel Henry Kress could have been written by Horatio Alger, except for the fact that Kress never married the boss’s daughter. Born in Cherryville. Pa., in 1863, he grew up a bookish boy who at 17 landed a teaching job in Slatington, six miles away. Kress’s salary was only $25 a month, but he managed to save up enough money to open a novelty store in Nanticoke. Before long, he had a wholesale house in Wilkes Barre. By the time he died in 1955, there were 264 Kress stores from Manhattan to Honolulu.

A lifelong bachelor with neurotic fear of disease (during World War I he lived for a year and a half in a hospital to be sure of getting sanitary food), Kress seemed to have only one love, his business. In reality, he had two. He read a good deal about art, was collecting in a small way before World War I. Finally, about 1920, he met the Italian collector Count Contini-Bonacossi in Rome. Kress decided on the spot that he would some day have a collection as good as the count’s. Soon he was the friend of Bernard Berenson, and eventually the client of the ubiquitous Lord Duveen.

Bigger than Mellon. Until Kress, Duveen’s best customer was Andrew Mellon, who built the National Gallery and gave it his collection. But the collection was not big enough to fill all those marble halls, and the story goes that it was Duveen who planted in Kress’s head the idea of the great gallery gift (“You’re not going to let Mellon have the whole National Gallery to himself, are you. Mr. Kress?”). Even after the first gift, the Kress Foundation kept buying, in 1951 started adding other institutions to its gift list. To qualify, a museum had only to show the necessary enthusiasm, to promise proper maintenance, and be located in a city with a Kress store.

There were times when the merchant in Sam Kress overwhelmed the collector; he would haggle like a rug merchant, end up by buying by the gross. In his later years he became more selective, and when paralysis removed him from action, his brother Rush and the foundation’s art director, Guy Emerson, continued buying and giving. The collection is by no means all masterpieces: mixed in with the Giottos. Bellinis, Rubenses, Rembrandts, Titians and Giorgiones are some lesser artists. But the collection’s value does not lie in its masterpieces alone. Like Andrew Carnegie’s libraries, it helped change the cultural geography of the nation.

In the entire state of North Carolina there was no public collection of merit until the Kress Foundation gave the Museum of Art in Raleigh 73 items. A Kress gift created such a stir in Birmingham that the city decided to build a whole new museum. Another gift to the Denver Art Museum brought on a rainfall of 1,186 acquisitions in one year from newly-inspired donors. In Allentown, Pa., the only museum around was housed in two rooms in an old house owned by the park department. Today, Allentown’s Art Museum has a building of its own (see cut) and a 52-piece Samuel Kress Memorial Collection, dedicated to the Santa Claus born almost a century ago ten miles away.