A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever

In order to make our house presentable as an object for sale we have followed the realtor's instructions and removed everything that "personalized" its rooms, and this meant among other things, the removal of the works of art on the walls.  It always seems pretentious to talk of having a collection; we are not the late Paul Mellon or any other grandee whose loans and gifts grace the walls of our country's museums.  Over time, however, I have been given, or bought, mostly easel painting from friends sometimes from strangers.  I happen to like the pieces, beginning with an oil very reminiscent of Max Beckman painted by my then twenty something year old brother in law who had recently finished studying at the Art Students League in New York City; this was somewhere around 1945.  I bought this for $45 in 1947 when I was living in the city.  It depicted two gaunt looking clowns or acrobats one of them holding a small hoop up to his face.  Later after my mother died in 1954 I acquired another by him,  an oil supposedly of my sister, a gift they had given her, or rather more likely imposed upon her, just as when they came to visit in Iowa they cooked us a meal of something they called "pasta" with lots of garlic in the tomato sauce.  This painting very much like a Roualt or maybe a Beckman, with some very nice blues in it.  I had a high school chum who went on to a career as professional artist and university professor of art from whom I received a marvelous painting he did when he was nineteen with lots of bottles, sort of a still life done as an abstraction (maybe influenced by Morandi?), although the placement of one of the bottles actually suggests (at least to my perfervid mind)  a flaccid penis with scrotum.  Later on I bought from him a very large drawing done after Giorgione's Fete Champetre, and . . .  Well, the list goes on and on.  The point is that over time I acquired enough pieces to fill the walls of a fifteen room house in Cambridge (not to mention the stuff I had to give to my wife when we were divorcing which I can see on the walls of my daughters).  I had to practice a certain amount of triage when my husband and I left that place and moved to the seashore.  Now they will all be going on to the walls of the condo in Sarasota and I am determined to put them up salon style, simply because I want to display all of them.  I tell friends that I will achieve the effect of the Palazzo Doria Pamphili in Rome, except of course that there the rooms are immense and the walls are tall and the pieces covering them are mostly masterpieces.  What I like about the arrangements of my walls are the juxtapositions, the arrangements of color, the suggestions of shape from picture to another.  In this respect I am a big fan of Dr. Barnes and so happy that the arrangements of paintings and other objects he achieved in the rooms built for his collection in Merion have been preserved in the new building housing the collection in Philadelphia.  Roberta Smith, I think it was, has made the suggestion that when the Metropolitan Museum takes over the Marcel Breuer building about to be emptied of the holdings of the Whitney Museum, the curators should plan something more adventurous than an obvious curated tour of their modern and contemporary holdings.  Since they cannot in any way compete with MoMA they might be more adventurous, for instance, hauling Baroque and Renaissance stuff out of the warehouse and putting up on walls against the contemporary works.  I wish that the directors of the Ringling Museum in Sarasota would once in awhile do the same with a gallery or two.  Their holdings are essentially what John Ringling bought from Mrs. Vanderbilt, I think it was, when she was going through a divorce, and she got it as a package she purchased from a French dealer. You can't escape the feeling of sameness.  It is a very good but not great collection, and if you live in Sarasota and it is pretty much the only game in town, the arrangement tires one.  I have a good friend who is a retired curator from the Met, to whom I posed this idea not long ago, over drinks one evening, and was surprised to discover how she was not amused, as though I had suggested disco at St. Patrick's or something similar.  I guess she thought it would not be a hang, but interior decoration.