Art: Mulliken Sale

New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art opened its doors last week for a special exhibition, a review of what it has done in the past year to help U. S. artists. Exposed were 161 items—paintings, sculpture, water colors, drawings, prints—added to the Museum’s permanent collection during the past year. Twenty-eight of these, purchased from the Museum’s recent biennial review of U. S. painting, cost the Museum just $20,000, an investment of $714 apiece.

Fortnight ago a succession of lush, heavily framed portraits passed across the stage of the American Art Association-Anderson Galleries. In the mannerly, well dressed crowd fingers snapped and pencils rose actively, and from his pulpit Auctioneer Otto Bernet bounced prices up $1,000 at a time. For Sir Thomas Lawrence’s huge canvas of Mrs. Raikes and Daughter, an agent paid the top price of the sale, $17,100. A Van Dyck, a Raeburn, a Gainsborough, a Romney each fetched more than $10,000. All told, 74 canvases brought $286,100 in cash. To the uninitiated it sounded as if Depression were over.

Dealers were not quite so impressed with the prices. The pictures, mostly authenticated French and British 17th and 18th Century canvases with long auction records, were part of the estate of Alfred Henry Mulliken of Chicago, a dealer’s delight who paid $75,000 for the Lawrence that fetched $17,100 at the auction. The whole collection cost him well over a million.

Born in Augusta, Maine the late Tycoon Mulliken went to Chicago in 1868 and amassed an enormous fortune selling switches, signal towers, hand-cars and other supplies to the booming railroads of the U. S. In 1922 he established the investment banking house of Mulliken & Roberts in New York City and—his Chicago house being “haunted”—moved to a 1,200-acre estate at New Canaan, Conn. There, his guests used to be driven around his estate in a private sight-seeing bus with the top down. His favorite cars were two Reo taxicabs with the meters taken out. When those wore out he bought Rolls-Royces, in pairs. To business he frequently wore a bottle green suit, green shirt, green tie, green derby.