YALE COLLECTORS

Convinced that Yalemen have won their Ys in art col lecting as well as most other walks of life, Book Publisher Thomas R. Coward ('19), president of Coward-McCann, Inc., set out to prove his point with an alumni loan show at the 124-year-old Yale University Art Gallery. The result, on view this week in New Haven, is a choice selection of 250 oils, watercolors and drawings from the private collections of Yale alumni, including such well-heeled art fanciers as New York Governor W. Averell Harriman ('13), U.S. Steel Corp.'s for mer Board Chairman Irving S. Olds ('07), Manhattan Finan cier John Hay Whitney ('26), Industrialist Stephen C. Clark ('03), Museum Director Duncan Phillips ('08) and Actor Vincent Price ('33).

Yale taste ranges generously over 500 years of art, from Hans Memling's Annunciation, El Greco's Christ Bearing Cross and Rembrandt's Gerard de Lairesse, all owned by Manhat tan Financier Robert Lehman ('13), to such high-velocity moderns as Jackson Pollock's Wounded Beast, 1943, owned by lectors' Art taste Critic is most Thomas B. accurately Hess ('42). reflected by But the current heavy U.S. corncetration in 19th and 20th century European masters. Top favorite: Picasso (seven paintings), followed by Degas, Braque, Cezanne, Delacroix, Renoir, Van Gogh and Goya (five each).

Significantly, the Yale exhibit also shows that U.S. collectors, long accustomed to taking their cue from abroad, have not neglected the home front. Nearly half the exhibitors had American paintings on show. Among them: such recognized American masters as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and Albert Ryder, and a sampling of the turn-of-the-century "Ash Can" realists.

In Gramercy Park, owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney ('22), Painter George Bellows has caught with bold brush strokes a golden instant of a summer day, quickened for today's viewers by nostalgia for that quieter age. Everett Shinn, one of the original Ash Can Eight, recorded another facet of the feather boa era in Trapeze, owned by Wall Streeter Arthur Goodhart Altschul ('43). A painter who often exclaimed, "Lord, I love the theater," Shinn depicted the flashing figures onstage at Manhattan's Winter Garden Theater. Shinn, with an old vaudeville fan's admiration for the acrobats' split-second timing, showed that he had a keen and appreciative eye for a pair of long silk-stockinged legs as well.

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