Art: Summer Storage

For nine months a year the average art collector cannot be separated from his collection. But in summer vacation time the art turns into a burden, vulnerable to theft and damage. “Most collectors send their paintings to their favorite dealers or store them in a warehouse, or sometimes leave them locked up at home,” says Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art Director James Rorimer. “We’d rather have them on our walls.”

In 1949 Theodore Rousseau Jr., the Met’s curator of European paintings, deciding to hang them there, launched a campaign to persuade collectors to use the museum as their storage room. “I began asking, ‘Are you going away this summer?’ and got responses. So I took a gallery, cleared it out and put the paintings in.” The Met has continued this policy every summer, given special billing to six summer collectors’ shows since 1949. This year’s, on view this week in eight newly added Met galleries, is twice as large as any of the past—145 paintings from 25 collections, including many top-ranking masterpieces rarely shown in public.

Hanging the paintings is a persistent problem. Arriving without timetable, the works, ranging from Lucas Cranach the Elder to Picasso, were hard to group by theme or period, but “Paintings from Private Collections” is one of the Met’s best ventures. So far, some 70,000 visitors have flocked in to see it. Prize items: ¶ Florentine Mannerist Jacopo Pontormo’s rarely exhibited Halberdier (owner: Chauncey Stillman).

¶ Gauguin’s Still Life with Apples, bought at auction last year by Greek Shipping Magnate Basil Peter Goulandris for the highest known price ($297,000) ever paid for a modern oil (TIME, June 24, 1957). ¶ Most of the little-seen Stephen C. Clark collection, including Van Gogh’s Cafe de Nuit, El Greco’s Saint Andrew, Rembrandt’s Praying Pilgrim, Cezanne’s Card Players.

¶ The seldom shown Siegfried Kramarsky collection, including Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Cachet and Garden of Daubigny, which Hitler ordered sold from German museums because’they were “degenerate.” ¶Goya’s Don Vicente Osorio, portrait of a Spanish prince at the age of ten, owned by the Charles S. Paysons. <¶ A whole roomful of first-class Cezannes.