American Collector

One of the riskiest experiments an art patron can make is to set a course that keeps him right up with the advance guard; too often the most beckoning highway turns out to be a blind alley. But Collector Edward Root,* a retired college professor with a tidy inheritance to dispose of, is one U.S. art patron with faith in young painters, and especially young U.S. painters. At Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where 132 of Collector Root's pictures were on exhibit last week, art lovers got a chance to see how well he had followed the changing course of U.S. art since the turn of the century.

Root bought his first oil painting in 1907, when he spent his $250 savings on a picture he liked. "It was the first time," he says, "that I was conscious that art makes an appeal to the emotions instead of the intellect." Emotions have been Root's guide ever since. In the days when Paris' moderns were the rage, Root went after such promising U.S. painters as George Luks, John Marin, Edward Hopper, and Charles Burchfield, who was still designing wallpaper in 1929 when Root first saw his work.

During the late '30s, Root slacked off his buying. But after World War II, he started picking up samples of the new abstract art. He was one of the earliest to buy Theodoros Stamos' dreamily delicate work, Jackson Pollock's paint-spattered canvases, and Mark Tobey's cool, almost Oriental calligraphy.

Lately Root has gone to England for some of Britain's best moderns. The Metropolitan show has a dark and gloomy landscape by Romanticist John Piper, examples of Graham Sutherland's thorny fantasies and Ben Nicholson's thin, surgical curves and angles. At 68, and feeling his age. Root has no idea whether the abstractionists he is now buying will eventually become recognized masters or not. But he thinks it is worth the gamble. "How else can a painter live?" he asks. "You've got to give him a chance to show what he's done."

*Son of Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of State, and brother of Elihu Root Jr., a vice president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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