The Baron

There was something in Walter Paepcke of the old-fashioned drummer: he could sell almost anything to anyone. But it was his special virtue that he was also a man of deep concern. "It seems to me," he would say with unembarrassed directness, "that there is too much emphasis on material success today. Businessmen have a responsibility to art and other fields of life." The observation was hardly new, but Walter Paepcke was determined to do something about it.

The son of a German immigrant who made a tidy fortune in lumber, Paepcke was the product of good Chicago private schools and more than the normal dose of private tutoring. He earned a Phi Beta Kappa key at Yale, in 1926 struck out for himself in business. By 1945, he had built up the Container Corp. of America into one of the world's most imaginative packaging concerns. But that year he also took a fateful vacation in Colorado.

Philosophy in Sauna. High in the Rockies he came upon what had once been a boom town that had boasted 16 hotels, three theaters and an opera house. It was called Aspen, and with a population of 600, it was still alive only because it happened to be a county seat. To Paepcke, it brought back memories of the great resorts of the Alps, and little by little he began buying up the place. What he had in mind was a cultural center, the like of which the U.S. had never seen.

To Aspen's disgruntled inhabitants, he was known contemptuously as "The Baron." But soon ski lodges, hotels, a health center and an amphitheater rose where nothing had been before. The winter, according to Paepcke, could be the time for sport; but the summer was to be reserved for artists and intellectuals. The procession that came was impressive--birdlike Igor Stravinsky, rehearsing his Firebird in jeans he insisted on calling "pantaloons"; the leonine head of Albert Schweitzer bowed over a keyboard; ebullient Mortimer Adler conducting a rapid-fire philosophical discussion while sweating in a sauna (Finnish bath). "The Aspen idea," said Paepcke, "is the cross-fertilization of men's minds."

The Impact. But even before Aspen opened, Paepcke had made his name known. "There are two ways you can make an impact on people," he explained. "Either give them a million dollars or spit in their faces. I can't give them a million, and I don't want to spit in anyone's face. But I can interest them, and that is what I'm trying to do in my ads." Paepcke had hit upon the idea of illustrating the "Great Ideas of Western Man" in a series of ads painted by top artists. It was a gallery open to millions--and millions came to know for the first time everyone from Ben Shahn and Gyorgy Kepes to Surrealist Rene Magritte.*

Walter Paepcke became what is called a patron of the arts, and the patronage has now spread throughout the business world. The first-rate architect is in demand as never before; the painter and businessman are on speaking terms; and no tycoon's home or office seems quite complete without its work of art. This has been one of the major art news stories of the decade, and one of the men who helped write it was Walter Paepcke, who died last week at 63.

* Whose familiar bowler-hatted Everyman, standing firm against chaos and bearing the symbols of simplicity and purity (bread and water), was used to illustrate Milton's description of the "victory of truth" (see cut).

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