S.B.C.C.A.

Making Texas businessmen look at contemporary art is no easy job. Persuading the wealthy among them to buy it is harder yet. This week Jerry Bywaters, director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, opened a show aimed at softening up the businessman's attitude toward U.S. and European modernists.

Although the exhibit included 53 top-notch works by some of the 20th century's most accomplished artists, it was not the paintings but the paintings' owners that were featured. Cryptically entitled S.B.C.C.A. (Some Businessmen Collect Contemporary Art), the show displayed, alongside each Matisse and Marin, a prosperous-looking photograph of the owner, plus a carefully documented pedigree of his business.

"We think this is the only thing that will impress the local businessman," says Bywaters. "A local man will look at a wild Picasso and think, 'What crazy jackass would buy a thing like that?'--and then see that it belongs to the vice president of Inland Steel . . . He'll wonder about his own taste and if maybe he isn't missing something." In addition to Inland Steel Vice President Leigh B. Block, the lenders included such successful modern-art buyers as Financier "Jock" Whitney (an Andre Derain), Cinemogul William Goetz (a Matisse) and Chicago Grocer Nathan Cummings (a Renoir). For the further edification of Dallas, the show also contained a John Sloan, a Vuillard and a Feininger from private collections in Fort Worth, a Max Ernst and a Loren Maclver from Houston.

Dallas Retailer Stanley (Neiman-Marcus) Marcus, who lent an ultramodern Rufino Tamayo to the show, gave fellow Texans a hardheaded reason for wildcatting in the field of modern art. "Most of the paintings hanging in this exhibition," wrote Marcus in an introduction to the show's catalogue, "have increased greatly in actual cash value since they were purchased."

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