Dale's Dilemma

"I'm a redhead; I'm liable to do anything," affably croaked Manhattan's No. 1 collector of French art, leather-faced ex-Utilities Tycoon Chester Dale. What Collector Dale was liable to do was a question that worried many a U.S. museum. From 1926 (when his wife switched his ruling passion from fire engines to art) to 1936 Collector Dale bought French paintings as shrewdly as he formerly consolidated power companies. His collection, now valued at $6,000,000 to $15,000,000, outgrew three Manhattan apartments, now fills five floors of a museumlike private mansion on East 79th Street, and is rated by experts as the most comprehensive of its kind in the U.S. Without children, 58-year-old, redheaded Chester Dale will probably leave his masterpieces to some big U.S. museum. The question of which one has got hungry U.S. museum directors into a dither.

Fortnight ago Collector Dale lent 25 of his best pictures to Washington's new pink marble National Gallery, where a great many more people will see them than ever got into Dale's Manhattan mansion.* The pictures, which included the famed Old Musician, one of the two most ambitious and highly valued (at least $500,000) items ever to come from the brush of the late great Edouard Manet, perked up the National Gallery's feeble Prench section like a shot of vitamins. Besides the Manet, rated as fine as the Dejeuner sur I'Herbe in the Louvre, Collector Dale's loan contained an assort ment of top-flight Renoirs, Degas and Corots, two Courbets, a superb Fantin-Latour, and important works by such 19th-Century painters as Eugene Delacroix and Jacques-Louis David. That Chester Dale's "loan" might be a permanent one was excitedly conceded last week in museum circles.

But whether the National Gallery would ever get any more such Chester Dale "loans" was doubtful. Reason: Of Collector Dale's 700 paintings, some 300 are by contemporary artists. The National Gallery hangs only pictures by artists who have been dead 20 years. "You don't suppose," snorted Dale, "that I would give my collection of Picassos, for instance, so they could bury them in the cellar until 20 years after Picasso dies?"

* Attendance figures so far this year: 1,667,135, larger than those of any other museum in the country.

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