Monday, Mar. 25, 1991

ART

By ROBERT HUGHES.

Museums live by getting. They risk stagnating when the flow of works of art into their permanent collections dries up. Which was just what the art-market boom of the 1980s threatened, by sending prices of certain categories of art -- in particular, Impressionism and early Modernism -- beyond their reach. Hence the fierce, if discreet, competition for big donors among big American museums.

It has been made more acute in the past few years by two factors. First, the shortening supply of American collections that actually contain the kind of things a great museum would want to have. (The 1980s produced shoals of zillionaires but few connoisseurs.) And second, a fashion among the rich for making their own "vanity" museums, a practice whose reductio ad absurdum was reached by places like the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago and the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles -- a $100 million shell with maybe six paintings of quality inside it.

Few collectors have been courted more assiduously than Walter Annenberg, 83, the former chairman of Triangle Publications and Richard Nixon's onetime ambassador to Britain. Over the years, Annenberg had assembled a choice group of some 50 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, for which -- only a year ago, at the peak of the now badly deflated art market -- he turned down an offer of $1 billion from a Japanese syndicate.

Over the past year or so, Annenberg's paintings went on tour to a number of U.S. museums that hoped to get them and vied with one another in the lavishness of their installations: the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington. The collection will go on temporary exhibit, starting June 4, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. And last week Annenberg announced that its landing there would become permanent: he had bequeathed his collection en bloc to the Met. At this news, the muted gnashing of directorial dentures was heard from coast to coast. "This is one of the largest single gifts in the history of the Metropolitan," crowed its grateful director, Philippe de Montebello. "It is a series of really magnificent works."

For his part, Annenberg (whose flagship magazine was TV Guide) said he had toyed with the idea of turning his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., into a "private little museum," but had decided to place the collection in a wider context. "There are only two complete museums in the world, the Louvre and the Met. My judgment was that the Met was probably the best protection I would get. It was a matter of continuity."

The Annenberg paintings will mesh very well with the Met's holdings of 19th and early 20th century art, their foundations laid by the massive Havemeyer bequest of 1929 and reinforced by legacies from Stephen Clark, Sam Lewisohn and Robert Lehman. Annenberg's paintings include several Cezannes, most conspicuously the great 1902-06 panorama of Mont Sainte-Victoire, so different from the Met's more constricted version of the same subject. The collection includes works by Gauguin, Monet, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard, and a group of Monets from the 1870s -- a phase of the master's work not well represented at the Met until now.

The 20th century works will also help flesh out the Met's skeletal early- Modernist collection. The Annenberg paintings include a very fine Georges Braque studio interior from 1939, and At the Lapin Agile, Picasso's self- portrait as Harlequin at the bar of a Montmartre dive. This souvenir of lost bohemia cost Annenberg $40.7 million at auction in 1989.

The gift comes with a few strings attached. Nothing in it can be sold or lent out. It will go into what is now called the Andre Meyer galleries -- an awkwardly designed space that the Met wants to rebuild. Will Annenberg toss in the extra $10 million or so the museum needs for the job? And will Meyer's name vanish from the plaque, to be replaced by the ex-ambassador's? Don't bet against it.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York