Three-Way Split

With their lawyers by their sides, the men at the head of Manhattan's three biggest art museums last week sat down to decide matters of mutual concern. They bound themselves to a three-way split of art, and agreed to keep out of one another's way from now on.

The massive Metropolitan, they decided, should concern itself with "classic" art (denned as art which "has become part of the cultural history of mankind"). The glassy, faddish Museum of Modern Art took for its bailiwick everything "still significant in the contemporary movement." And Greenwich Village's Whitney Museum--the youngest of the three, and something of a poor relation at the conference table--agreed to stick to U.S. art.

That done, the Met and the Modern got down to the serious business of swapping some of their incongruities. First to cross the border was to be Daumier's Laundress. It was now 86 years old, and an obvious "classic"; the Modern would turn it over to the Met. In exchange the Met would deliver Maillol's bronze Chained Action and Picasso's 1906 Portrait of Gertrude Stein, which Gertrude had hopefully willed to the Met (TIME, Aug. 26, 1946).

For the first time in its history, however, the Met would spend good money for Picassos. The two it chose were from eras when Picasso was painting in a classic style: the Woman in White, painted in 1923, and the 1905 Coiffure. The Met also agreed to buy from the Modern three Seurat drawings, paintings by Signac, Cezanne, Redon, Rouault and Matisse; sculptures by Maillol, Despiau and Kolbe, and a raft of U.S. folk art--all for $191,000. That would give the Modern more money to spend on contemporaries and relative unknowns--who might some day become "classic."

While in a spending mood, the Met also laid out a million dollars for something more in its line: a collection of Middle Eastern, Greek and medieval art. It purchased part of the private collection of the late Joseph Brummer, a wealthy art dealer who had some 150 favorite pieces that he had refused to part with while alive. Among his prizes: a 5th Century B.C. limestone bull's head from the palace at Persepolis, and a 3000 B.C. Greek marble statuette of a harpist, that had some of the well-rubbed simplicity of British Modern Henry Moore.

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