From Mondrian to Martial Airs

For nearly everyone, a mania for collecting is a transitory phase of childhood. But for a few, the habit becomes a lifelong obsession. For Manhattan Art Dealer Sidney Janis, it began with hoarding marbles during his boyhood in Buffalo, and led to a perceptive collection of 20th century art. For Anne Kinsolving Brown, daughter of a Baltimore minister, the impetus came from a book on soldiers that she spied in a toy store at the age of nine. "The bands were still playing in 1915," she recalls, "and the French poilu still wore red trousers." The book opened up a brave new world of dashing soldiers, and over the years she has amassed the nation's out standing private collection of lore on military panoply. For both collectors, the fruits of their passion last week rated a salute from the museum world.

The Test. In Manhattan, the Museum of Modern Art placed on display 103 paintings and sculptures by 55 artists that Janis and his late wife Harriet had winnowed from a lifetime of art purchases. Valued at upwards of $2,000,000, they range from Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni's 1913 Dynamism of a Soccer Player, through Arp, Klee, Pollock, De Kooning, and wind up with portraits of Janis by Segal and Marisol. The onetime maker of M'Lord Shirts bought his first Matisse in 1926, went on to become one of Manhattan's most successful art dealers. Still sprightly at 71, he has given his collection to the Modern. In any other city, it would be enough to start a museum.

In selecting his paintings, Janis hewed to his favorite thesis: the greatest artists of each generation are usually the least understood by their contemporaries. Mondrian and Leger, who Janis believes will stand the test of time better than Picasso, are represented by eight Mondrians, four Legers. Still, Picasso is there with a thorny 1928 Painter and Model, which the Modern's Al fred H. Barr Jr. ranks as one of the most valuable pictures in the collection. What kind of test other than difficulty does Janis apply to art? It must relate to the tempo of the time, says he. "I was always interested in what was happening. That's why I signed up for aeronautics in World War I instead of artillery."

Second Bulge. At a gala banquet in Richmond, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts named the tall and stately Mrs. Brown "Collector of the Year," an award bestowed by the museum's enthusiastic society of collectors on their exemplars (past titleholders: Virginia's Paul Mellon, Chicago's Leigh Block and Cinemactor Vincent Price) in return for a chance to view some of the collec tor's prizes. For her turn, Mrs. Brown put on exhibition 78 prints, drawings and watercolors and 25 books depicting British military uniforms from Henry VIII to George V, selected from her martial collection, which has now grown to 30,000 volumes and 40,000 graphic illustrations.

Left at home in Providence were the 3,000 toy soldiers that form the nucleus of her collection and that she began assembling on her European honeymoon after marrying John Nicholas Brown, scion of one of Rhode Island's richest families. The bride returned home with a parade of toy soldiers. Today she downgrades her early purchases, feels that only half a dozen are real collector's items. Far more choice and valuable are the books, paintings and prints, ranging from tailors' plates to one vista of Wellington's funeral that opens out to 88 ft., which she began buying in order to identify each soldier's uniform.

Her husband bore it all until Easter week of 1967, when he discovered that the walls of their 18th century mansion were literally buckling under the five-ton weight of the collection housed upstairs. In an operation referred to by the family as "the Second Battle of the Bulge," one-third of the entire 15-ton collection was transferred and donated to Brown University (which John Nicholas Brown's great-great-grandfather founded). The rest will follow, when the university finds the space; but the memories will remain. "I truly believe," says Anne Brown, "that no category of human endeavor has been pictured more than the military profession. And why? Because over the years, the men who themselves had no urge to endure the heat of battle--the artists and poets and composers--felt in their hearts a debt of gratitude to the military men who had earned them the privilege of living in peace. So they made these men immortal."

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