Double Loss

Art has its many pleasures, its private and its public aspects. It can be contemplated alone, in the silence of a study, or it can bring brightness and glory to vast galleries. The best museums try to offer the visitor both. In the U.S. the two polarities have long been the Phillips Collection in Washington, an ideal haven for art lovers tucked inside a staid Victorian mansion, and New York's Metropolitan, the nation's largest and richest museum. Last week death came to the two men who directed these institutions: Duncan Phillips, 79, who ran the most intimate of museums, his own, and James Joseph Rorimer, 60, who on a Sunday could watch 47,000 visitors pour through the Met's portals. Both men, in their way, had given visual pleasure, instruction and enlightenment to millions.

No Guards for El Greco. Duncan Phillips was above all else the single-minded connoisseur. His goal: "To stand sponsor especially for the lonely artist in quest of beauty, independent of all cliques and movements." Art, he felt, was to be shared as he had experienced it best, in "an intimate, attractive atmosphere that we associate with a beautiful home." Grandson of a Pittsburgh steel tycoon and independently wealthy, Phillips, after Yale ('08), turned to art. One of his initial loves was Daumier. He bought the French caricaturist's Three Lawyers in 1919, the first of what became one of the choicest Daumier collections in the U.S.

Settled in Washington and married to a fellow art enthusiast, Marjorie Acker, he was soon buying selectively throughout the ages, from an El Greco to a classic Renoir such as Luncheon of the Boating Party, picked up in 1923 for an adventurous $125,000. Bonnard became a special love (he owned 26). As his collection grew (it totaled some 2,000 paintings when he died), the Phillipses in 1930 were crowded out of their home, but they maintained it as a museum with its Oriental rugs, comfortable chairs and ashtrays, and no cordoned-off areas or guards.

Phillips had a special feeling for the artists of his own time, early bought John Marin, financed U.S. Abstractionist Arthur Dove with a monthly check from the 1930s to the artist's death in 1946. In later years, Phillips' taste moved on to such U.S. moderns as Pollock, Motherwell and Rothko, bought each for his own merits. "There are no schools or movements worth a moment's attention," Phillips maintained. "There are only true artists and pretenders."

Fountains for Pleasure. By inclination, James Rorimer was equally the scholar, with a liking for privacy, but his position as head of the Met placed him at the epicenter of the museum explosion that saw the Met's attendance during his decade of direction soar to more than 7,000,000 visitors annually. In response, Rorimer turned builder. He added a 150,000-volume art library, reopened 43 newly air-conditioned galleries, expanded exhibition space by 41% to a total of 20 acres. All the while, he had to preside over a staff of 600 and administer a budget of more than $5,500,000. During his stewardship the Met's collection grew to 6,000 European and American paintings, including 33 by Rembrandt alone.

The son of a Cleveland interior designer, Rorimer combined a taste for architecture and a liking for the decorative arts. As a boy, he made a candlestick on his own lathe; as a freshman at Harvard ('27), he had already begun collecting rare Rhodian pottery. At the Met, he became a medieval specialist, presided over the Cloisters, a priceless museum, literally from the ground up: Rorimer preceded the masons by building gunnysack forms to guide them. At the time of his death he was planning the new $5,000,000 American wing.

Bigger Game. For a scholar and administrator, Rorimer revealed an unexpected flair for showmanship and a love for cloak-&-dagger art sleuthing. During World War II, he was decorated for ferreting out the caches where the Nazis had hidden their art loot, proudly boasted that he was the first Allied offi cer to enter the Louvre upon the liberation of Paris. As director of the Met, he relished prowling galleries for finds, made auction history when he bought Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer for a record $2,300,000 with a wink. Last March he went to London to watch the bidding for St. George and the Dragon, was only momentarily crestfallen when it went to the National Gallery; his real game in Europe was a much bigger, and still unconsummated purchase.

Occasionally his sense of showmanship swept him overboard. Asked recently if the bust of a woman purported to be after Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra di Benci, which the Met bought at a Parke-Bernet auction for $225, was really a Leonardo, Rorimer winced, said, "If you never see it exhibited in the Met, you will know it is not."

Oysters & Bequests. At home with his wife Kay, he preferred to relax with slippers and pipe, thumb through old auction catalogues. Occasionally he turned cook, entertained friends with gourmet Chinese dinners, including a sauce that he maintained had 99 ingredients.

There, he had hung a colored reproduction of the Met's 15th century Flemish Merode altarpiece as a souvenir of one of his grandest coups. In 1957 he had the pleasure of propping up the original in his tapestry-hung office, while King Baudouin was trying to keep the masterpiece in Belgium. What the King did not know was that the horse had long since left the barn; the triptych that the art experts thought was the original was only a dimly lit copy.

No matter how exhausted, he knew that success depended on attention to details large and small. Asked once what he had accomplished at the end of one tiring day, he sighed and replied: "I have just come from eating oysters in front of an open fire with two elderly ladies." Then, brightening, he added: "They will one day make a very handsome bequest to the Met."

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