Shorty's Triumph

The 533,000 citizens of Buffalo, though not celebrated for love of art, have in their midst a museum envied throughout the U.S. Contemporary artists hold few places in higher esteem than the Albright Art Gallery. And there are few men for whom the dealers of Manhattan. Paris or London have more respect than its principal patron, Seymour H. Knox, 63. A small (5 ft. 5 in.), peppery man who is a crack polo and court tennis player as well as a director of six major companies (Marine Midland Trust Co., F. W. Woolworth), Knox is a born enthusiast--and his chief enthusiasm is modern art.

Next week, at a full-dress ceremony attended by Buffalo's mayor, by New York State's art-collecting Governor, and by artists, critics and architects from as far away as Japan, the gallery will celebrate its change of name to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. It will also open a $1,700,000 wing given mostly by the Knox Foundation and designed by Architects Slddmore, Owings & Merrill. Though the Knox wing is modern, it ingeniously avoids clashing with the original 1905 gallery, which has been described as the "finest example of pure Greek architecture in the U.S." Built on lower ground, the wing has the appearance of an extension wall that leads to a tower of dark glass.

Roaming the Ages. When "Shorty" Knox joined Albright's board of directors in 1926, the gallery already had a collection of surprising quality. It roams the ages in an almost haphazard way: an African mask, a Khmer sculpture, terra cotta tomb figures from China, a Cycladic idol that dates from the Bronze Age but looks as if it might have been sculpted yesterday. There are a few minor masterpieces from the Renaissance, works by all the major French impressionists, a first-rate collection of American art from Gilbert Stuart through Winslow Homer to the present.

Today, thanks to Seymour Knox, the gallery's major claim to fame is as a showcase of contemporary abstraction. By 1939 Knox was president, and that year Director Gordon Washburn, now director of fine arts at the Carnegie Institute, set aside one room for abstract art. For a while all purchases went through a committee, but Knox soon grew impatient with the wrangling. "I decided," says Knox in his no-nonsense way, "that I was providing most of the money, so I should have more to say about what we bought--with the help, of course, of the gallery director."

Second to One. With Washburn and his successors--Andrew Ritchie, now head of the Yale Art Gallery, and the present director, Gordon Smith--Knox has had a relationship any museum man would envy.

"When we've seen a painting we liked," says he, "we've been able to make up our minds quickly without having to go through a committee. We are the committee." In the last seven years alone, Knox has given more than 160 works to the gallery. He got his Pollock before the artist's sudden death sent Pollock prices skyrocketing. The Albright was the first museum in the world to buy a Clyfford Still and one of the first to buy a Henry Moore. It now has at least one work by almost every major abstractionist from the late Arthur Dove and Wassily Kandinsky to Willem DeKooning. Mark Tobey and Robert Motherwell. Today, says Knox--and not many in the art world would disagree--there is only one collection of abstract work that is better, the one in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

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