Page 30 - Studio International - July 1966

I bought a Klee

by Ella Winter

John D. Rockefeller's buyer of Egyptian art was once Dresden Gallery or Berlin museums, being told how I
asked how he could tell on what to spend those millions. ought to like this and that —
`It's not difficult,' he is said to have replied. 'When I `Why ?' I would ask obstinately.
look at an object, if it goes klik, I like it, if it goes klik-klik `Because this is Tintoretto— or Rubens—or Raphael' —
inside me, I like it very much, and if it goes klik-klik-klik I would come the shocked and reverent reply. I have a
buy it.' fellow feeling nowadays when I see a small child dragged
Many times people have asked me what made me through galleries.
acquire the art I did and I was always tempted to But once in Hollywood, soon after I arrived there, a
quote this reply. As I look back, that seems to be the pro- fateful event happened. I have forgotten the name of the
cess, as far as I can figure it out, by which I did my lanky young man who came to our newly-rented house.
choosing. They say every picture one likes is an uncon- He came quite often, and he talked about modern art. He
scious analysis of oneself, and so it must be, just as any was assistant in a small newly-opened modern art gallery
other manifestation of deep likes or dislike. on the Sunset Strip—a section of blaring Sunset Boule-
With me, picture buying started when I went to Holly- vard; he was no part of the film world, nor was I. Holly-
wood about the time of the outbreak of the Second World wood is a company town and if you are not in the
War. Married to a Hollywood playwright and screen- company, you are very much apart. One day he asked if
writer, acquiring pictures had become a possibility. Up he might hang some pictures on our walls.
till then it had been out of the question, and I had no `We have more paintings than we know what to do with,'
more relation to actual buying than has the ordinary he sighed in his rather gormless way. 'They stand with
person. That is probably hard to imagine today when the their faces to the wall and no one sees them; here at least
art market has become an item of world interest, re- they would be seen. And you have all these stucco
ported in the world press and TV. But as short a while as walls ...' We certainly did have all those stucco walls,
twenty-five years ago it was still confined to a few very in this not very attractive 'Spanish-type' rented house,
wealthy people with whom the ordinary plebs had no acres of dark and gloomy expanses of smudgy yellow,
relationship. In Hollywood Edward G. Robinson had knobby and uninviting.
already started his beautiful first-rate collection, but he Doubtfully, but willing to experiment, I assented, and a
was the exception that proved this rule. few days later he brought two small, bright Lurçat
At any rate I had had no training. As a rebellious water-colours, a name not in my mother's Baedeker: boats
youngster my intellectual mother would drag our reluc- and flags and clouds and sky of a lovely dark-light blue.
tant feet through art museums and I remember my bore- (And now, this year, this month, as I am writing, Lurçat
dom in the Alte Pinakothek and the Neue Pinakothek and the died.) I had visited him later in his studio, and came

Paul Klee Paul Klee
Phantastisches Kaktus 1925 Antike Fabel 1923
Watercolour 11 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. Ink 9 1/2 x 7in.