The Affectionate Critic

"Criticism is the art of affection," says James Thrall Soby, and he has made himself a leading U.S. art critic by writing 31 affectionate books about painters he admires. As chairman of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art's department of painting and sculpture exhibitions, he is equally in the public eye. But only his friends have known that Soby, while helping guide the museum's buying. >has for years been assembling a collection of his own, using the fortune he inherited from his family's interests in Connecticut shade-tobacco growing and pay-telephone manufacturing. Last week 57th Street's Knoedler Galleries put on display Soby's 70 paintings, drawings and sculptures.

Hartford-born Critic Soby was a sophomore at Williams College when he bought his first work, a reproduction of a print by Maxfield Parrish showing a nude girl seated "on a swing over an Arcadian terrace." Next he turned to the "big three'' of the time: Picasso. Matisse and Derain. Much as he admired these artists, Soby was not a man to stick with the crowd for long. His collection grew in no one direction, wandered gently over the face of modern art with his affections and consistent good taste to lead the way.

Pink & Sapphire. As critic, Soby wrote the first U.S. book on surrealism and neoromanticism, then turned out a study of Italian Painter Giorgio de Chirico that Alfred Barr calls "the best monograph on a living artist." His own nine De Chiricos are probably as good as anything the artist ever turned out. Yet it is hard to say they are the best of the collection.

Picasso's tiny Nude Seated on a Rock --curves of pink flesh set against a sapphire sky--gleams like a piece of jewelry. There are lonely street scenes by the Russian-born American, Eugene Berman, a moving little Fisherwoman by Berman's equally romantic brother Leonid. In the fiery Matta canvases colors explode and splash, while the unearthly landscapes by the late Ives Tanguy. who was one of Soby's closest friends, are strewn with strange shapes, which led Tanguy to call one painting The Furniture of Time. The collection has a dung-colored landscape by Jean Dubuffet ("the strongest painter in postwar France"), a couple of childlike fantasies by Paul Klee ("the vigilant ally of accidental beauty"), an unusually appealing Liberation by Ben Shahn showing three small French girls swinging wildly in the air upon the liberation of France.

A Longing for Delacroix. For all his success with contemporary art, Soby at 54 has misgivings about such a collection. "There is too much snobbism today about the impressionists, and about the contemporaries, about buying the work of a 'living' artist, and about having 'modern' taste. As a result, a lot of interesting work is being neglected--Italian mannerism, for example, or the art of 19th century Venice, or early 19th century German romanticism. One longs to enter a house or apartment in which Delacroix hangs in Renoir's place, or Courbet in Cezanne's."

Soby may have been torn at one time or another between recommending a painting for the museum or buying it himself. In the end, it will come to the same thing. Though he has a son, he has willed the whole collection to the museum.

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