COLLECTOR'S CHOICE

Most collectors who spend a lifetime accumulating works of art prefer to see them set like jewels in the crown of a single, favored museum. Manhattan's Samuel H. Kress, 89-year-old dime-store tycoon, is one big collector who would rather spread his masterpieces around. In 1939 he gave 375 Renaissance paintings to Washington's National Gallery of Art (TIME, July 24, 1939). Since then, museums in Philadelphia, Tucson, Birmingham, Honolulu, Portland (Ore.). Seattle and Kansas City (Kans.) have been quietly handed some 200 masterpieces from the Kress treasure-trove, with no strings attached. Two of the latest beneficiaries on the list are Houston's Museum of Fine Arts and New Orleans' Isaac Delgado Museum of Art (see color pages).

This week New Orleans will unveil its Kress gift: 31 paintings, spanning four centuries, from the Renaissance's 14th century dawn to the last flowering in the 18th century, and including such greats as Tintoretto, Bellini, Veronese. Two of the finest are Tiepolo's angelic 18th century Portrait of a Boy Holding a Book, with its ruddy flesh tones, velvety browns and yellows, and Pannini's The Pantheon and Other Monuments of Ancient Rome, whose picnickers, barking dog and proud, weed-grown ruins form a landscape as gently charming as anyone could wish. Among Houston's 30 choices, which will be delivered after its new wing is completed next fall: the 15th century painting of St. Lucy Led to Her Martyrdom, by Siena's Bernardino Fungai.

In Manhattan, Collector Kress and the officers of his Kress Foundation could take pleasure in the fact that the first showing of their gift was New Orleans' biggest art event in 40 years. The museum has rebuilt three of its galleries, put in new lights, air-conditioned the entire building in anticipation. New Orleans citizens got reproductions of the new treasures on buses, in their gas and electric bills, and the museum expects to double its number of visitors next year. Said Alonzo Lansford, director of the Delgado Museum: "It was a heady experience . . . to be able to point to masterpieces and say, 'I'll take that one and that one.' "

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