The Successful Brother

Jose Lazaro Galdiano was a 13-year-old in his native village of Beire, Spain, when he bought his first work of art--a terra cotta angel's head that cost less than a dime. Within a few hours, his rambunctious kid brother had smashed the piece for a joke. Jose, the son of a broke nobleman, found money hard to come by, but when he got his hands on cash he spent it on art. Through the years he became a professional art dealer and a multimillionaire, filled a palatial, 34-room house in Madrid with treasures. Last week the house was opened to the public as a museum; it struck one critic as being "second only to the Prado."

Lazaro began his business career as a bank accountant, earned enough money before the turn of the century to strike out on his own. On muleback, aboard stagecoaches and on asthmatic trains, he combed Spain for art works that dealers had overlooked. His profits enabled him to broaden his operations, which eventually included all of Europe and the Americas. Lazaro was one of the first to go to Russia after World War I, came back with trunkloads of masterpieces. "Those Reds," he exulted, "don't even know the difference between a Rembrandt and a colored calendar!"

He married a wealthy widow from Argentina, founded a topflight cultural magazine, La Espana Moderna. Lazaro's collection included such old masters as Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Rubens, El Greco and Goya, plus masses of coins, medallions, jewels, miniatures, tapestries, antiques, ivories, armor, enamels and sculptures. It was always open to visitors--with two notable exceptions. The first was the brother who had smashed his terra cotta. The second was William Randolph Hearst --"That I will never allow," snorted Lazaro. "He started the Spanish-American War."*

Spain's civil war drove Lazaro to Paris. He stayed at the Ritz, filled his suite there with treasures. Victorious Franco liked Royalist Lazaro no better than had the Republicans, used his Madrid house as a police headquarters. Lazaro spent World War II in Manhattan. Art dealers got to know the trim little man with the beard of a Biblical patriarch. He was still voraciously snapping up old masters.

In 1945 Lazaro packed his new acquisitions aboard a liner, headed home. Franco had relented a little; Lazaro was allowed to take over his own house. There, three years ago, he died, after gratefully willing his house and collection to the state. The brother who smashed the terra cotta got nothing, lives in a poorhouse.

*As publisher of the New York Journal Hearst was in no position to start a war, but his high velocity descriptions of Spanish atrocities in Cuba fanned the flames.

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