COLLETOR'S CHOICE

NOT everybody has the stuff to be an art collector; it takes money and taste as well as the urge to collect. Joseph Pulitzer Jr. had all three by the time he was a senior at Harvard. Grandson of the founder of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, son of its second editor-publisher, he had been surrounded by art at home from childhood, and had sharpened his taste in four years as a fine arts major. In 1936 Joe Pulitzer made his first leap as a collector, bought Amedeo Modigliani's Elvira Resting at a Table (opposite). For the next two decades he kept buying paintings and sculpture. Today, at 43, Editor-Publisher Pulitzer (he succeeded his late father in 1955) owns about 140 works of art and has become one of the U.S.'s fastest rising collectors. This week, for the benefit of Harvard's Fogg Museum, more than half of his collection is on exhibit at Knoedler's in Manhattan.

What the exhibition plainly shows is that unlike so many collections. Pulitzer's was not bought like stocks and bonds as an investment ("I don't use investment counselors for art"). Nor was it selected by commissioned experts. Pulitzer never played it safe when it came to collecting art. "I buy only what I like and what I consider significant, not what others may recommend that I buy," says he. "Otherwise, my collection would have neither character nor individuality."

It has both. Except for an Ingres and Van Gogh drawing, a Cezanne oil and a few other late igth century works, the collection consists entirely of contemporary art, ranging from Afro to Vuillard, and including Picasso, Rouault. Matisse, Klee, Braque, MirO, Villon, Bonnard, Tamayo. Elvira and another early buy, Max Beckmann's Zeretelli (opposite), are typical of the individual pictorial styles and expressiveness that caught Pulitzer's eye. One of the best painters to come out of Germany in this century, Beckmann did this perceptive portrait of the ballet dancer-prince in 1927 as part of his constant effort to find "the bridge which lead from the visible to the invisible." Pulitzer bought it in Switzerland in 1939 after the Nazis, calling it "degenerate," banned it from German museums.

Modigliani's sad and tender Elvira, perhaps depressed at the sight of the dying man painting her, was done in his characteristic arabesque style. By the time he painted this picture, "Modi" no longer had the strength to stagger around Paris with Utrillo. each toasting the other as "the greatest painter in the world" and "the greatest drinker." A few months after he finished the picture the painters, sculptors, poets and models of Montmartre and Montparnasse gathered for his funeral, and an enormous cortege solemnly followed the hearse to the cemetery. All along the road the same policemen who had arrested the gay and irresponsible Modi with such alarming regularity came to attention and saluted the coffin.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.