On Art

...In the course of its existence, the Gallery has mounted exhibitions comparable m authority and quality to the best museum exhibitions The Fauves (1950), International Dada (1953), Futurism (1954), Analytical Cubism (1956), as well as individual exhibitions devoted to modern masters—Rousseau (1951), Mondnan (1953), Fernand Leger (1957) In the past decade or more, it has featured the New York School painters (Pollock, Kline, De Kooning) and more recently, the new Pop and Op artists Since many of the works involved m these exhibitions have entered the Jams Collection, the gift to the Modern is an example of largesse on the grand scale The terms of the Jams gift, which mcludes 103 works of painting and sculpture, are especially generous The works in the collection may be loaned to other mstitutions or sent on traveling exhibitions There are no stipulations that the works must be placed permanently on view or that they must be housed in special galleries Anyone familiar with the 19th-century appointments that make a hodge-podge of the Thann-hauser Collection at the Guggenheim Museum (and are noticeably out of step with Wnght's architecture) will realize how such provisions can work to the disadvantage of a beautiful collection Furthermore, 10 years after the donor's death, the Modern -?after its usual careful deliberation"—may sell or exchange certain works m the Jams Collection in order to acqmre new works by new artists The Museum, m other words, has not had its hands tied by the gift, and Jams, who has cooperated with the Modern on many occasions in the past, has testamentally affirmed his faith in the mstituhon's judgment A special provision has already been made, too, allowing the Modern to dispose of works before the 10 year moratorium is up This was done so that the Museum might acquire (at a reported pnce of $350,-000) the huge Jackson Pollock canvas, One The painting is now displayed (evidently on credit) in the current exhibition No disposition has yet been made on what works will be sold to pay for the Pollock Since the collection will tour museums m the United States and abroad for the next two and a half years, only a buyer willing to allow his purchase to remain on the road will be able to acquire one of its several Mondnans or its five staking Schwitters collages Still, it seems hard to believe that many of the European masters in the collection would be expendable True, the Jams Collection adds eight Mondnans to the 10 the Museum now owns, and the Schwitters collages, beautiful as they are, may constitute an embarrassment of nches, considermg the two dozen or more the Modern already has in its possession But the Picasso Painter and Model would hardly be a likely choice As Alfred Ban notes m the introductory brochure (a complete catalogue of the collection will be issued m the fall) the Picasso is "a capital work," a beautifully pamted, sardonic illustration of one of Picasso's favonte themes the confrontation of art and life m the figures of the painter and his model In this painting, the Cubistic freaks of the studio are transfixed at just that moment when the painter has sketched in on the canvas, at dead center, a strikingly classic profile drawn from his monstrous model Nor does Boccioni's Dynamism of a Soccer Player, a ohoice example of the Futurist style, seem a likely candidate for the auction block My guess would 'have been that the younger, still active painters and sculptors would be the first to go But Barr notes that these are often the most difficult works for the Museum to acqmre When young artists arrive at then- mature styles, their works are usually priced beyond the limits of the Museum's purchase funds The Segal, no doubt, is unusually secure One can scarcely imagine the Modern allowing its beautiful Mondnan to depart in company with its ghostly dealer...

...for its 10th anniversary, the Jams Gallery celebrated by mounting a superb exhibition of the modern masters and modern movements with which the Gallery had been associated 75 works, ranging from the Cubists to the New American painters, which had passed through the gallery on their way to public and private collections The exhibition made its point handsomely The Jams Gallery dealt m gilt-edge securities Now, for the Gallery's 20th anniversary, Jams has made an even more striking gesture by donating to the Museum of Modern Art on rather generous terms the collection of paintings and sculpture he and his late wife Harriet had been collecting since 1926...

...ON ART By James R. Mellow Toward the end of the Sidney and Harriet Jams Collection, the exhibition of painting and sculpture currently installed at the Museum of Modern Art, I came upon one of those works which seem to sum up —not always in a favorable way—a period or an aspect of a period in art history In this case, the period is our own The work is George Segal's Portrait of Sidney Jams, a hfe-size plaster cast of the New York art dealer standing in a representative pose, one hand on his hip, the other settled on the frame of a picture mounted on a wooden easel The picture k a radiant small Mondnan composition, daiting from 1933 Wfaat we have here then, is a portrait of a New York art dealer, one of the sharpest in the business, in the act of displaying a gem from his private collection...

...Segal's plaster figures are taken, quite literally, from hfe His subjects —artists, dealers, curators, friends?provide 'the living armatures m the creation of his chalky white sculptures Smothered m grease, mummified m strips of cloth and gobs of hot plaster, they endure the uncomfortable hours it takes to complete a figure m the round, emerging from their Segal cocoons by leavmg old suits and old boots behind They experience their art the hard way The resulting facsimiles are not usually Largesse on the Grand Scale flattering The features are puffy and blurred, the figures, crude and a bit awkward They are a race of frozen white humanoids, drawmg a pathetic half-hfe from the environments in which they are stationed The second-hand chairs and tables, the drab apartment-house lobby and cheap cafeteria settings confer meaning upon their clumsy gestures In then way, Segal's genre sculptures, though larger in scale and more sophisticated in their story-telhng, are like the Rogers Groups, those 19th-century plaster figurines which depicted homely bits of American hfe with equal amounts of sentimentality and finical detail Segal's portrait tells a story, too, rt summarizes both the Jams collection and the history of the Jams Gallery modern art from Mondnan to Pop Segal's mistake, I think, was including that particular Mondnan m his sculpture—or, for that matter, any Mondnan An indifferent pioture of any kmd would have served to complete and sustain the sculptural ensemble The Mondnan Composition, with its irreducible logic—a few black lines, two red rectangles and an elongated blue one structured solidly mto a white ground—so fixes and satisfies the viewer's attention that Segal's half of the scriptural collage, the ghostly attendant figure, is rendered altogther extraneous Inadvertantly the sculpture represents the triumph of art over life-studies At 72, Sidney Jams operates one of the most prestigious gallenes on the New York art scene Flair, rather than flamboyance, characterizes the Jams approach to the art world, along with a certain shrewdness m calculating tends in contemporary art At the beginning of the 1962 season...

...Jams mounted an extensive show of Pop artists under the banner "New Realists," the European term for the new style The exhibition signalled and sanctioned the build-up of the Pop movement Two years ago, Jams' exhibition of "Erotic Art" was less successful m precipitating a trend but it did reflect the new and growing freedom in sexual matters and manners Jams has also shown an extraordinary aptitude for tapping the nght artist at the nght tune, often acquiring him from some unhappy dealer who had promoted the artist to the point where his talents were ripe for Jams For an American artist, the imprimatur of the Jams Gallery is the sign of having definitely arnved Janis's only peer in terms of influence is Leo Castelh, the uptown Pope of modern art Compared to Castelh, the 57th Street dealer is a good deal less in the hmelight Cas-telli's behind-the-scenes activities at the Venice Biennales, for example, always receive extensive press coverage and interim criticism Though not immune from artists' suits or bad publicity, Jams' maneuvenngs are less talked about A difference in style can even be seen is the way the two men handle their exhibitions Aside from the one-man shows of gallery artists, Jams often devotes considerable space and time to theme shows and exhibitions of historical periods m modern art Every Jams exhibition has a catalogue which, while generally spare on critical texts, is sumptuously produced and illustrated One gets the impression that the catalogues are provided as much for the historical record as for the attending audience Castelh deals mainly in one-man exhibitions and group shows of going reputations He seldom bothers with catalogues, but the regular gallery-goer is sure to receive m the mail a striking piece of graphic work, either a poster or an announcement card, alerting him to the gallery's forthcoming exhibitions The distinction may be a small one, but it illustrates the difference between a dealer who has a sharp eye on history and one who is up to his neck m the immediate scene In 1958...