Chrysler Collection Touring Nation
An unprecedented show went on the road last March when 101 paintings belonging to the private collection of Walter P. Chrysler Jr. '33 started out on an eighteen-month tour to leading museums in the country. The first showing took place at the Portland (Ore.) Art Museum, where Thomas C. Colt Jr. '26, who first proposed such a mobile exhibition, is director.
Valued at $5,600,000, the collection represents years of careful buying, selectivity and imagination. In an account appearing in Time, April 16, it was stated: "The traveling exhibition is testimony to Collector Chrysler's far-ranging tastes and shrewd buying Chrysler eased into collecting by searching out the buyers' markets: 'When other collectors bought large canvases, I would buy small pictures. Later, when smaller paintings were more readily hung, I acquired large ones. When interest lagged in English, Dutch and Flemish schools, I added them.' In 1939 Collector Chrysler also set a U.S. auction record for Cezanne paintings by paying $27,500 for the portrait of MadameCezanne."
The collection, which is one of the most valuable privately owned groups of paintings ever to take to the road, includes masterpieces ranging in period from late Renaissance to Braque and Matisse. Carried in three moving vans, the paintings are protected by police escorts and are taken by secret routes. The last stop will reach the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1957.
Chrysler, whose love of art and collecting began in his school days, is today an authority on Renaissance and modern painting and sculpture. In 1941, when Thomas Colt was director o£ the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, an exhibition of modern art from the Chrysler collection was held there, resulting in notable attendance and interest, and bringing to the fore Chrysler's collecting abilities.
One of a group of experts who selected the paintings to be included in the present tour, Thomas Colt was recently cited for his achievements as director of the Portland Art Museum in an article which was reprinted in the Congressional Record.
Courtesy of Look Magazine Walter P. Chrysler Jr. '33 (r) and Thomas Colt '26 shown in a New York warehouse whilechoosing the paintings to be included in the traveling art exhibition.
