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.”

¶ Isabella Stewart Gardner of Boston was a plain Jane with weird endearing ways. All men were apparently fascinated by her. To Bernard Berenson, who constantly advised her on what to buy, she was “the Serpent of the Charles [River].” To T. Jefferson Coolidge she was “Aphrodite with a lining of Athene.” Henry James wrote to her about “those evenings at your board and in your box, those tea-times in your pictured halls [which] flash again in my mind’s eye as real life-saving stations.” To her patient husband she was simply “Busy Ella.”

Mrs. Gardner made it her business to set Boston impolitely on its ear. Such a concentric society, she reasoned, would appreciate eccentricity. She chartered a locomotive for a picnic, led a lion on a leash, drank beer at “pop” concerts, and once, during Lent, donned sackcloth and scrubbed the steps of Boston’s Church of the Advent. Meanwhile she kept buying pictures, and putting her servants on short rations so that she could do it. Her greatest caprice, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, is a Venetian palazzo on The Fenway in the midst of Boston, containing some of the world’s best pictures (among them Titian’s Rape of Europa).

¶ Peggy Guggenheim, most dashing of the second-generation collectors, has “found nothing astonishing in a life larded with blood-splattering parties, gatherings with public confessions and public disrobings, flagrant infidelities and hysterical rows,” says Author Saarinen. A bouncy bit of heiress in a housecoat of peach-colored feathers, she always collected artists along with their art. Surrealism was her first great passion, and it took her into a marriage to Max Ernst. Abstract expressionism was her second, and included a penchant for Jackson Pollock as a man. Now, full of years and honor, she lives in a Venetian palace, paints her toes and fingers silver, and has her own gondoliers sashed in blue to match her eyes. They call her “L’Ultima Dogaressa.” Saarinen’s book shows that collectors are people (and not always the best people.) They may not always have known much about art, but America’s great collectors bought what they liked. Nearly all bequeathed what they bought to U.S. museums. Thus, in Author Saarinen’s words, “their private possessions have become public pleasures.”

*A word invented by Renaissance Art Expert Bernard Berenson to denote clients with uncounted millions.