Perfectionist

The world does not need to travel to see the world's art. As Andre Malraux put if in the first volume of his brilliant Psychology of Art, recently published in the U.S., art books with good reproductions are very like a "museum without walls"--wide open to stay-at-homes.

Albert Skira, a slight, sandy-haired Swiss, has spent half of his 45 years making such museums pay. His 46-volume Les Tresbrs de la Peinture Franc,aise has sold a total of 1,000,000 copies in France and Switzerland alone. Last week Skira was on a flying visit to his new Manhattan office to push U.S. sales of such other works as The History of Modern Painting, of which two volumes, at $12.50 each, have already been published. By week's end he had hopped back to Geneva to finish preparations for Volume III.

According to Alexander Malitsky, head of Brentano's art-book department, the History is "creating a big revolution in the publishing business. Many of the art books full of color plates nowadays are just fireworks--full of color, yes, but bad color. These books are very, very fine." To make them fine, Perfectionist Skira himself picks the paintings to be reproduced, decides the layout of each page, assigns the accompanying texts to authoritative critics, and carefully supervise's every step of the printing.

Skira bought his first art work, a Picasso gouache, at 16, and paid for it in $2 monthly installments over a year and a half. At 25 he left Geneva for Paris, carrying a suitcaseful of secondhand art books to sell and cherishing a fond hope that Picasso might be persuaded to illustrate a book for him. After a year in Paris he at last met his idol and made his proposition. "That will cost you $1,250 an engraving," said Picasso, and turned away. Pale but firm, Skira replied, "I'll want 30 of them." They decided to make the book Ovid's Metamorphoses. Skira borrowed part of the money, jubilantly sent announcements to booksellers throughout Europe asking for orders, and received only one, for a single copy.

But copy by copy the book began to sell, and Skira was able to follow it with Mallarme's Poems illustrated by Matisse. Today the best copies of both are collector's items valued at $2,500, and Skira no longer has to borrow money to publish what he pleases. The field, he says happily, is inexhaustible, "for the more people know about art the more they want to know."

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