Rich Tastes

Private art collectors, provided they are well-heeled, have some real advantages over museum-keepers. They are not restricted by trustee tastes or by public demands, and they are under no compulsion to build representative, "balanced" collections. They buy what they like, when they like, for their own pleasure.

A good cross section of private collectors' accomplishments--and tastes--is now on display at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. The 87 paintings and sculptures in the show were lent by five collectors.

The John Hay Whitneys' pictures, which top the show, are magnificent examples of such modern French greats as Renoir, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Rousseau, Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse. "Jock" Whitney, 47, has an eye for painting to equal his eye for horseflesh and business investments, and his vast fortune amply accommodates his tastes. The Whitneys have a full-time curator, Art Historian John Rewald, to help with their collection, but Whitney decides on all purchases himself. "We've bought what struck us as being particularly beautiful," he says.

The best of the Whitneys' pictures ordinarily hang in the living room of their Long Island home: "The standards are set right there. We don't have to go into museums or churches to study art, though we often do. Of course it takes no special taste or imagination to collect masterpieces--I think ours at the Museum can be called that. But if you're living with your paintings, you don't much care to experiment." (Those which the Whitneys consider experimental are hung in other rooms.)

Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III can afford to experiment, since she keeps her modern art purchases in a guest house. The boldest of collectors, she is also the most reticent, and springs from rather than to the defense of her choices. Along with distinguished sculptures by such European moderns as Brancusi, Giacometti, Lipschitz and Marini, she buys the smear-technique abstractions of such avant-garde Manhattanites as Baziotes, Motherwell, Rothko and Tomlin. Her hand-dribbled Jackson Pollock (see cut) is appropriately small.

The Ralph Colins began collecting paintings because they "wanted something to hang on the wall." Corporation Lawyer* Colin and his wife decided on modern paintings as "more appropriate in a modern apartment--old masters in the same surroundings would be chichi." Though they specialize in such safe school-of-Paris bets as Rouault, Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Soutine and Modigliani, the Colins admit to having made some poor purchases: "But we love our mistakes--we never sell or exchange them."

The John Seniors have a passion for an extremely dispassionate painter: Piet

Mondrian. They own 13 works by the late, strait Dutchman, all bought within the past two years. Because bulky, 35-year-old John Senior is an aeronautical engineer (and head of the fledgling New York Airways, Inc.), his friends assume that mathematical precision is what he appreciates in Mondrian. "Mondrian has nothing to do with math," Senior insists. "His paintings exhilarate me, stimulate my thinking. You can't explain things like that any more than you can explain what you feel listening to the Eroica. But Mondrian stays with you through hangovers, depressions . . . grows on you all the time. For instance, my wife could never see Mondrian, but since we got married last January, she's lived with his paintings and that changed her mind. When we sent them to the Museum, she actually started missing them."

The Clifford Odets also have one favorite painter: Paul Klee. Playwright Odets considers him "the greatest innovator of the 20th Century," has bought no less than 70 of his oils and watercolors. The Swiss painter's Dance of the Grieving Child strikes Odets as being as "great as the Mono, Lisa. It's a portrait of an adolescent, mooning, self-mirroring, bursting out with a sense of herself." The Black Prince puzzles him a little: "It could be growing out of the ground, half man, half vegetable, or a construction--a medieval turret. Sometimes it's like the wonderful sound of cellos. There's the quality of night in it ... maybe the night of civilization."

Such private enthusiasms as these have a way of becoming public. By gifts and example, individual collectors help shape the taste of museums, and museums obviously influence the public. So the day may not be far off when Mondrian and Klee are as generally admired as Renoir and Seurat. Even Pollock & Co. may eventually find a niche in the hearts of their countrymen.

* General counsel for CBS; a director of Alfred A. Knopf, Stainless Steel Products, Inc., etc.

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