Page 49 - Studio International - January 1965

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1
A view of the installation of
"Eighty Works from the Richard
Brown Baker Collection·
at the Walker Art Center.
Minneapolis

2
William Congdon
Piazza San Marco No. 1
51 X 56 in.
3
Hans Hofmann
The Pond
40 X 50 in.

Since it is a peculiarly American fancy that whatever knowledgeable, perceptive, independent, and good
has been around long enough is to be reverenced, the humoured. They acquire out of conviction and by no
collector concerned himself either with antiquities or means by the shipload; they sometimes make errors,
exempla of princely epochs which, by association, had succumb to fashion, bully museum curators, vote
the power of ennobling his name and his person. He wrong in local elections, and catch head colds. They
was dynastic minded; he wanted only the power to are, in short, human beings subject to the follies of
create an ancestral line of which he was the supreme the species, and, surprisingly often, men and women
achievement. He was the natural prey of genealogists, of enormous dedication to art. While many lack the
but he was, au fond, no fool; if he remembered all too colour of their nineteenth century antecedents, most
poignantly that his grandfather was an unwashed are more creditable people, whose taste and sensibility
illiterate and that his grandmother dipped snuff, he are perpetually on trial, and who are quite prepared to
made certain others forgot. Such memories of the past risk ridicule in order to enjoy the fruits of their sorties
could be dimmed by splendours of the present and into the market place. There is less of the Medici than
monuments to the future. The American collector was of the 'New Man' about them, and they are usually
the supreme patron of his own immortality. That his excellent company.
motives were ludicrous, his tactics execrable, and his Richard Brown Baker is a splendid example of the
taste non-existent seemed never to have occurred to New Collector. A friendly, well-spoken man in his early
him. fifties, Mr. Baker has nothing of the hipster about him.
It has been suggested that the present genus of A Rhode Islander by birth, he is refreshingly removed
American collector has been prompted into being by from the New York intellectual pattern-too often a
a sense of guilt for his own cultureless past. This, pattern cut from querulousness, rhetoric and slogans.
obviously, is nonsense of that special sort fostered by His habitual manner is courteous, his habitual expression
nostalgic activist journals which refuse to abandon the a smile, sometimes friendly, sometimes wicked, some­
thinking of the pre-depression era; by and large, the times modestly triumphant. His interests are manifold,
current crop of American aficionados enjoys its collec­ but somehow his conversation remains closely con­
tions immensely. What is more, far from being slavishly nected to matters that are allied, or at least analagous,
manacled to a borrowed past it seems to be enjoying to art. And, indeed, in his apartment in Manhattan's
a rousing affair with the present. The new American upper West Side one's attention seems perpetually
collectors are generally young (or at least youngish), pinioned to art. The furnishings are discreet and com-
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