A. Life of Involvement

Chicago probably has more collectors per capita than any other city in the U.S. And in Chicago, when a collector develops a taste for art, he is,likely to treat himself to gargantuan helpings. Walls full of it. Rooms full of it. When the rooms fill up, he will glass in the porch or build an annex. When these are full to the rafters, he simply buys another house.

The city's passionate possessors snap up everything from Chinese vases to French furniture, but the biggest and bounciest collections are those of contemporary art. Fanciers of today's --and tomorrow's--painting, sculpture, kinetics and whole environments wade into galleries with eyes, minds and checkbooks wide open. As a tour of Chicago's top half-dozen dazzling collections shows, a new generation of collectors, many of whom are self-made millionaires, are brashly pitting their taste and understanding of today's baffling art trends against the judgment of the future and backing their hunches to the hilt. Nothing is too optical, poptical or far out to be in their homes (see following color portfolio).

Champagne Evenings. The competition for the title of most venturesome art collector in Chicago is indeed formidable.*In the 1950s, it would undoubtedly have been awarded to an enthusiast of abstract expressionism, Muriel Neuman, who picked up her first major De Kooning for $2,000 in 1950, long before most New York collectors were taking the movement seriously. More recently, the nod would have gone to Arnold Maremont, 63, president of Maremont Corp., maker of mufflers and other auto parts. The muffler man's 300-piece collection, valued at $2,000,000, shines throughout his manor house in Winnetka, at corporate headquarters, and in Maremont's Arizona hideaway.

Though the Maremont collection includes three Leger pictures, three Hun-dertwassers, nine Dubuffets and 33 Klees, many of Maremont's most illustrious acquisitions are sculptures, among them Brancusi's mellifluous bronze Blonde Negress. Much of his art was bought on Maremont's twice-a-year buying trips to Europe. For many years, Maremont and his wife have been fixtures at the Venice Biennale, renting large boats and treating their 90-odd passengers to champagne evenings on the Grand Canal.

Mystery & Authority. Real. Estate Man Joseph Randall Shapiro, 63, president of the fledgling Museum of Contemporary Art (TIME, Nov. 3), is equally geared to the current scene. His private collection consists primarily of surrealist and brutalist works, about which he often writes and lectures (Francis Bacon's Man in the Blue Box, for example, was recently taken along to a Presbyterian church to illustrate a lecture on the existential human condition). Though Shapiro maintains that he has never paid more than $5,000 in cash for a painting (and seen some appreciate to as much as $60,000), he warns against the notion that art is merely a canny investment. For him, it has meant a "life of involvement. A full response to a work of art is a complex reaction between intuition, thought, knowledge and perception. For me, a painting has to have two things--mystery and authority." Rene Magritte's see-worthy Chant a"Amour is richly endowed with both.

Ebullient Edwin A. Bergman, 50, president of Chicago's U.S. Reduction Co., values a work of art not for its mystery but for what it tells him of the artist who made it. "You sometimes wonder," he jests, "whether you are buying the art or a piece of the artist." The Bergmans' home is jammed with several generations of Dadaist and surrealist works. Some are by unknown artists, others by famous ones, who are personal friends.

Bergman caught the collecting bug in 1954, soon met Surrealist Wilfredo Lam and through him acquired an interest in surrealism. He also acquired Roberto Malta's Onyx of Electro, a key exhibit in the survey of Dada and surrealism opening this week at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.

Another favorite is Sculptress Marisol. In fact, the Bergmans were lunching with her on Nov. 22, 1963, when they heard of Kennedy's assassination. They went sadly back to her studio, there saw her 1961 Kennedy Family. It had been returned from a West Coast gallery where a fellow artist had playfully drilled the Jack Kennedy doll in the chest with a pistol. Aghast but fascinated, Bergman bought the work after Marisol had repaired it.

False-Teeth Collage. The average visitor, ushered through the five galleries annexed to the Winnetka chateau belonging to Retailing Executive Robert Mayer, 57, wishes he had brought along his sunglasses: more than 450 works of op, pop, ob, blob, kinetic and frenetic art jump, creep, twitch, jiggle or blaze from every conceivable wall and cranny. Some of Mayer's purchases are spectacularly fine, including Robert Rauschenberg's Buffalo II, a recent star at the Sao Paulo Bienal. Many others are simply spectacular. For, as Mayer is the first to admit, he has something of a glass eye for art.

During his World War II tour of duty in France, he reminisces, he looked up Pablo Picasso in Paris. Picasso offered to let him pick out a picture, so Mayer did. It turned out to be by one of Picasso's students (the master let him choose a second). Today, Mayer lets dealers do most of the picking. But his infectious enthusiasm has made modern-art converts out of several of his neighbors. Even the Mayers' butler now assembles collages from bow ties and false teeth, which Mayer hangs along with his Oldenburgs and Tingue-lys. "We buy what we like," he explains, "not for appreciation, but enjoyment. I hope we never stop."

In the case of New Orleans-bred Lillian Florsheim, ex-wife of the late Shoe Manufacturer Irving Florsheim, art appreciation has led herto both collecting and creating art herself. Her constructions are composed in the constructivist vernacular that she favors in her collection, which is rich in Vasarely, Albers, Calder and Gabo. For the past two years, she has held shows at Chicago's Main Street Galleries, has sold work to Collectors Mayer, Bergman and Connecticut's Joseph Hirshhorn.

Secret Success. Widest-ranging among the Chicago collectors is Morton Neumann, 69, owner of a small mail-order cosmetics house, and none of the collectors mystifies his rivals more. Not that they fault his taste. The living room of Neumann's town house is festooned with Picassos, the dining room with Miros, and the former state dining room with a history of postwar U.S. art. The mystery is how Neumann goes about making his selections. Even among art dealers, he is known for the hard bargains he drives rather than for esthetic likes or dislikes. Despite Neumann's taciturnity, Picasso seems to have been taken with his company, and Sculptor George Segal took him on a tour of his plaster-castery. As far as Neumann is concerned, the secret of his success as a collector will remain just that. Says he elliptically: "The works collected me. I didn't collect them."

-Considered hors concours are Leigh and Mary Block, whose gilt-edged collection, valued at $10 million, focuses conservatively on impressionists and postimpressionists. It is currently touring U.S. museums.

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