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JUDD  VOGUE MARCH 15, 1972

VOGUE ART

"Buying happiness": THE EXTRAORDINARY LOUISE AND JOSEPH PULITZER, JR., COLLECTION  BY BARBARA ROSE

What is the difference between the patron and the collector? The art lover who buys a creative role by commissioning works and encouraging artists to explore new territory is a rarity in the modern period. The history of art is filled with the names of famous patrons; but most, with the exception of such men as Poussin's patron P.F. de Chantelou and Watteau's admirer Gersaint, were noble or ecclesiastical patrons, often buying with state or church funds. In our time, the great patrons have been such farsighted dealers as Vollard and Kahnweiler in Paris, Stieglitz in New York, and Herbert Walden in Berlin, who risked everything to show the public art that challenged prevailing academic taste.

Today's speculator who keeps the auction block hot can hardly be classed with such men. Yet there are still a few who care deeply for the art of the time, who have been both venturesome and constant. Dr. Albert C. Barnes, whose foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, contains an extraordinary collection of Post-Impression, Fauve, and Cubist works, and Duncan Phillips, who turned his private homes in Washington, D.C., into a personal gallery, where exceptional in the personal involvement in the collections they formed. So is Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., whose acquisitions since 1958 were recently on view at the Wadsworth Athenium in Hartford, Connecticut.

Publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and heir to a great publishing empire, Pulitzer has been collecting art since he was a student at Harvard. In his collection are a dizzying number of masterpieces by the greatest modern artists; Picasso, Matisse, Klee, and Miró, above all, are represented by many of their finest works. When Pulitzer buys, it is from love and conviction. "I always buy too late," he said of his recent purchase of paintings by Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. "I follow my own instincts. I never get any bargains, because I wait until I see the work myself. Sometimes that takes a long time, and I pay high prices because I buy too late. But I don't mind because I only buy to make myself happy and only works that will always excite me."

In his airy summer house, designed in the fashion of a Japanese wooden temple by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, Pulitzer hands some preferred works, including Monet's series of "Water Lilies" that appears to bring the greenery and water surrounding the open pavilion into the house itself. Constantly arranging and rearranging the paintings and sculpture that he circulates between his country estate and town house, Pulitzer spends a part of each day inspecting his collection, personally installing each piece as it arrives. For example, one sultry day last summer, he could be seen polishing a bronze head of Brancusi's "Mademoiselle Pogany III," intimately engaged with the work on a one-to-one basis.

Recently, Pulitzer has commissioned outdoor sculpture by Don Judd, which, because they are permanently installed and executed for a specific site, were unfortunately not in the exhibition. At first, the effect of these sharply contemporary abstract works surrounded by the bronzes of Matisse, Maillol, and Rodin was jarring. Soon, however, they appeared as natural in their setting as the more familiar human figures. Pulitzer wrote the catalogue entry on Judd's stainless-steel, topographical sculpture himself, describing the process by means of which the artist arrived at his conception. A box set askew inside a box that slopes following the incline of the lawn it occupies, the Judd sculpture, according to its owner, "head-on can be perceived as a flat plane; from an angle, as a geometric pattern or what in reality it is - an enclosure." In his essay, Pulitzer describes the pleasure of viewing the piece at different hours: "As I live with this presence I become more impressed daily with its solemnity and authority. It will 'bug' a lot of people but in time they will appreciate its displacement of space, its scale, its austerity, and its definition of the land it occupies."

In these days of transience and throwaways, it is heartening to find a patron who not only understands what he is buying and can talk about it intelligently but who is not afraid of committing himself to permanence. Such a viewpoint is quite at odds with the "collector" who refused to buy a painting from an artist when he found out it was to be a ceiling fresco on the grounds that "you can't take it with you." No, you can't take it with you, but you can leave behind something enduring that expresses a loftier conception of art. 

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Washington's new-old Renwick

Part of the glorious string of eleven museums that forms the Smithsonian Institution, the just opened Renwick Gallery, now perhaps the most important national museum chiefly exhibiting American craft and design, includes a re-creation of its original Gilded Age grand salon, above——draped, palmed, hung as it was in 1885——the first museum to put itself on exhibit.

8  VOGUE, March 15, 1972