ROAD SHOW

ONE of the most princely private caravans of art ever to take to the road was camped last week in Portland, Ore., first stop on an 18-month tour of major U.S. museums. Carried in three moving vans, traveling by secret routes and picking up police escorts en route, the show's 101 paintings added up to $5,600,000 worth of art masterworks, ranging in period from late Renaissance to Braque and Matisse, in size from a 20-ft. Monet Nympheas to an 11-in Madonna and Child by Dutch Master Lucas van Leyden. Owner of this treasure trove (plus an estimated 2,000 additional paintings and drawings and some 1,000 pieces of sculpture stacked away in apartments and warehouses): Multimillionaire Walter P. Chrysler Jr., at 46 a retired business executive, a sometime book publisher, horse breeder, Broadway producer, collector of odds and ends from old racing magazines to penny banks.

The traveling exhibition is testimony to Collector Chrysler's far-ranging tastes and shrewd buying. An art connoisseur since he first started saving up his allowance at 14 to buy a Renoir landscape with nude (a Hotchkiss master tore it off the wall as unsuitable for schoolboy eyes), Chrysler eased into collecting by searching out the buyers' markets: "When other collectors bought large canvases, I would buy small pictures. Later, when smaller paintings were more readily hung I acquired large ones. When interest lagged in English, Dutch and Flemish schools, I added them." In 1939 Collector Chrysler also set a U.S. auction record tor Cezanne paintings by paying $27,500 for the portrait of Madame Cezanne

One hit show on the road has only whetted Chrysler's enthusiasm for more. In the last month he has bought three major Picasso works, including Lady with Artichoke, painted in 1942 and first shown after the war. Although bought too late for the present show, it will get a top billing in Chrysler's newest project: an all-Picasso show for later this year, all chosen from his own collection.

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