Katherine & Saidie

At the dignified, Romanesque doorway of the Yale University Art Gallery last fortnight arrived 450 strange-looking canvases, ranging from geometric abstractions to fantastic Dadaist scrawls: the second largest private collection of 20th-Century art in the U.S.* To hang of all 450 pictures, the Yale Art Gallery would have to build an extra wing. But meanwhile, Yale's gallery director, Theodore Sizer, planned to show the public as much as he could.

This hoard of modern art came from the rambling West Redding, Conn. farm house of a 64-year-old spinster named Katherine S. Dreier who has painted, collected and talked about modern art for almost 30 years. One of modern art's U.S. pioneer converts, massive, hemp-haired Katherine Dreier stored away abstractions like a Connecticut squirrel hoarding nuts for a hard winter. Other later and richer art squirrels sometimes, got bigger and tastier nuts than Katherine. But her hoard contained more different kinds than any body else's in the U.S. Unable to house it properly on her farm, even though she built an extra wing for it, Collector Dreier toyed with the idea of giving it to a local church. Many a U.S. museum eyed it hungrily. But finally Collector Dreier made up her mind, and the whole kit & boodle went to Yale, because it was handy.

When the 1913 Armory Show gave the U.S. its first real taste of revolutionary European painting, Katherine Dreier was converted from an ardent suffragist into the most ardent U.S. booster of artistic revolution. A mediocre painter herself, she traipsed massively through the ateliers and studios of Paris encouraging, propagandizing, buying. With famed French Painter Marcel Duchamp (Nude Descending the Stairs} and U.S. Abstract Photographer Man Ray, she formed the Socieete Anonyme, first society for collecting and spreading modern art in the U.S., started her tremendous collection under its name. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, the Societe Anonyme's famed rival, is nine years younger (1929).

One of the few treasures Collector Dreier did not give her Societe is a painting on glass by Abstractionist Duchamp which she has had built into the wall of her house. Several years ago, on its way to an exhibition in Brooklyn, the glass picture got shattered. To restore it, Artist Duchamp made a special trip to the U.S., pieced it together like a picture puzzle, found that the cracks improved the com position.

Last fortnight while West Redding, Conn.'s Katherine Dreier was making her gift to Yale, another patroness of modern art did her bit for modern art in Baltimore. Baltimore's modern-minded matron was grey-bobbed Saidie May, diminutive, onetime wife of the League of Nation's opium-sleuthing Herbert L. May.

A painter, friend of artists and omnivorous collector like Connecticut's Dreier, Widow May has long been a mainstay of the up-&-coming, somewhat theatrical Baltimore Museum of Art. Last fortnight the Baltimore Museum opened up Saidie's latest gift: a $10,000 basement room, complete with lounges, books, music and an adjoining cook & kitchen, where Baltimore Museum members could gather, sip tea and look at modern art. For its opening, Saidie May's new room was tricked out with an exhibition of queer, calligraphic, surrealist paintings by famed Frenchman Andre Masson, who arrived in the U.S. last summer (TIME, June 9) via Martinique. Surrealist Masson, present in person, delivered a learned lecture in French on the origins of cubism and surrealism. Shy Saidie May did not attend.

*Largest: the Solomon R. Guggenheim collection of 1,000 20th-century paintings, at present housed in Manhattan's Guggenheim Foundation Gallery of Non-Objective Art.

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