The Best of the Best

With increasing enthusiasm, U.S. businesses have become the Medicis of modern art, but never have U.S. artists received such an imaginative boost from business as they did last week. S. C. Johnson and Son (wax products) announced that it had spent about $750,000 to buy one recent painting each by a representative selection of the nation's top artists. It was the largest single industrial investment in art to date, bigger even than the collection at New York's Chase Manhattan Bank. More important than the size of the investment was the quality it had bought. When Director James Rorimer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art saw transparencies of the paintings, he said they formed the finest collection of current American art he had ever seen.

The first breezes of the big windfall began to stir nine months ago, when Chairman Herbert Johnson of the famous wax company invited Manhattan Art Dealer Lee Nordness to lunch in Racine. The company had earlier shown its taste in the arts by building a spectacular Frank Lloyd Wright building that is now a Wisconsin landmark. Now Johnson wanted to find out what the firm could do for U.S. painting. Nordness replied: Buy major paintings from top living U.S. artists and exhibit them as widely as possible.

Dealer's Dream. It happened that Nordness had been selecting and photographing 102 works to reproduce in color in a forthcoming book aimed at showing all phases of contemporary U.S. painting. Johnson's quick and stunning decision was to ask Nordness to buy those paintings, all but a few done since 1959, and form a collection that could travel anywhere in the world for as long as there is a demand for it. "Buying the collection," says Nordness, "was a dealer's dream."

As Nordness went about his work, other dealers began to speculate about just what he was up to. Since Johnson wanted to conceal his name lest prices soar, Nordness had put it out that he was buying for a

Swiss client who had an avid interest in American art. As he went from gallery to gallery, rumors spread, one of them being that his mysterious Swiss client was really the Soviet government. Yet he got almost every painting he wanted before someone else snapped it up.

Ambassadorial Mission. The two major omissions from his impressive roster (see box) are Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, neither of whom likes to be shown with other artists. Otherwise, the collection is as comprehensive a view of American art today as can be found. It ranges in style from Edward Hopper's clean-limned piece of Americana, done in 1960, to an eerie "combine" by Robert Rauschenberg. A shimmering forest scene by Charles Burchfield complements a Sam Francis abstraction showing swirls of blue dancing a quadrille across the canvas. The great precisionist Charles Sheeler, usually associated with geometric views of industrial America, is represented by an extraordinarily lyrical landscape bathed in twilight. John Wilde has a delightfully funny fantasy called Happy, Crazy, American Animals and a Man and Lady at My Place, done in 1961. The tiresome shibboleths of the gratuitously embattled art world vanish: the figurative and abstract paintings consort like long-time companions, and the brilliant assembly proves that no school has a monopoly on beauty. Even the most familiar artists brim with youth and vigor in this collection.

In September the collection will go on exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Center, and then, having made its American debut, it will go to Europe to start a tour that may last for years. The whole affair, says Herbert Johnson, "is an experiment by a business firm in international relations on a people-to-people level." If quality and variety can win friends, the paintings should prove excellent ambassadors.

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