Taste on the Campus

Though Harvard's Fogg Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery have long been renowned, until recently the average U.S. campus art collection was apt to consist of a hodgepodge of works donated by alumni with more generosity than taste, housed in a dusty wing of the fine-arts building. Today college museums across the country aspire both to finer art and glossier quarters. In April, the University of Michigan reopened a renovated $750,000 museum, and Brown will soon break ground for a new $2,000,000 art building. Other schools that, since 1958, have opened new buildings or added to old ones include North Carolina, Wellesley, Pomona, Brandeis, Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska, Texas, Dartmouth and New Mexico.

White Rock Girl. All share a common problem: what to put in the new building once it is completed. Few discriminating collectors leave their best paintings to universities, and acquisition funds are piddling compared with those of any big-city museum. St. Louis' Washington University, however, has found a good way to solve the problem. Though the school receives only $11,300 a year in income from bequests for the acquisition of painting and sculpture, it has built its collection into one unmatched by any school in the Midwest. The school simply shops in the contemporary art market, where top-quality art can often be bought for relatively modest prices.

For its first 65 years, Washington's collection was nothing to show anyone. Founded in 1879, it consisted mainly of odds and ends cast off by Missourians: embossed beer tankards, a Greek vase collection, a marble mountain nymph by a local artist (now in a university library and known to undergraduates as "the White Rock Girl"). Then, in 1945, Curator Horst W. Janson, aided by a committee, weeded out 125 paintings and 500 pieces of bric-a-brac, auctioned off the lot for $40,000. The money was used to purchase 28 paintings, sculptures, collages and tapestries by Picasso, Braque, Moore, Stuart Davis, Klee, William Baziotes and other French and American moderns. Janson's selections are today valued at more than $514,000.

Handsome Payoff. Since the present curator, William N. Eisendrath, 64, moved the collection into its zippy new $650,000 Steinberg Hall gallery in 1960, he has added still more modern paintings, including Sam Francis' flamboyant Arcueil and Roberto Matta's perkily prismatic Abstraction (see color opposite). There are also other, more familiar works, such as a Jackson Pollock that was bought in 1953 for $3,000 and is now insured for $60,000.

Most recently, Eisendrath has been venturing cautiously into pop. One of his prize purchases is Bob Stanley's Crash (Indianapolis 500). All this has paid off handsomely. Enrollment in Washington's art courses has tripled since 1957; gallery attendance has risen too. And Washington is also providing adults in the community with a stimulating alternative to the more orthodox St. Louis City Art Museum. Steinberg Hall plays host to three or four major traveling exhibitions a year, and one of them, an Alexander Calder exhibit, recently pulled 40,000 visitors --30,000 of them from off the campus.

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