Tranquil Treasure

A masterpiece," says Art Critic Alfred Frankfurter, "is--like the President of the United States--what is elected as one. Confidently voting their judgment, Frankfurter, the Museum of Modern Art's Alfred H. Barr Jr., and a committee of other top-rank critics and collectors last week put on display at Manhattan sWildenstein Gallery 69 paintings and drawings, in a benefit show simply and coolly labeled "Masterpieces."

Gathered out of 26 museums from coast to coast and from Florida to Montreal and from 27 private collections of such art patrons as David Rockefeller Henry Ford II and Mrs. Marshall Field, the show brings together mostly unfamiliar works, including three Rembrandts. Richly hung against red plush walls in three small rooms and a connecting foyer a wide variety of styles and periods offset each other, inviting fresh appraisals and creating an effect that is intimate and dazzling--like diamonds nestling in velvet More surprising is the mood of the collection: a luminous tranquillity.

From the earliest work, Florentine Bernardo Daddi's 14th-century twin-panel altarpiece of Virgin and Child and The Last Judgment, to the latest, a 1948 still life by Matisse, there is hardly a masterwork that reflects turbulent emotions Enthusiasm there is, such as in Degas' pastel Singer with a Glove, but most portrait subjects are caught in repose: Manet's pipe-puffing Smoker, Tintoretto's velvet-clad, regal Venetian Senator, Joos van Cleve's Mater Dolorosa.

A Placid Van Gogh. Biblical themes, so often shown in bloody violence are also restrained: Carpaccio's The Meditation on the Passion, a somewhat surrealistic scene of peaceful death, or Giovanni di Paolo's Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, a nonviolent exile in which the principals appear to have shed everything, including expressions of remorse. Of the relatively few El Grecos in the U.S., the chosen canvas is not an anguished saint or sinner, but a corpulent Trinitarian monk at ease in an armchair.

A similarly uncharacteristic canvas is a pastoral landscape by Van Gogh--the placid Plain at Auvers. It is a subtle study of pale blues and greens in which plowed fields and few trees lie under a sky that hardly swirls as much as the one in Francesco Guardi's gently shaded Venetian Scene.

Even coincidence smiled on the collection. Three paintings never before seen in the U.S. share and contribute to the gentle aura that pervades the whole. Cubist Georges Braque calmly analyzes an end table littered with fruit and knick-knacks in a brown and green oil lent by Art Patron Mrs. Louise Smith. Industrial ist Alex Lewyt lent Pierre Bonnard's landscape of a country byway. Former Ambassador John Hay Whitney contributed Vuillard's rosy-hued canvas of a young woman relaxing at her embroidery.

In Memoriam. Describing the year-long selection process of the exhibition. Frankfurter confessed surprise that the 19-member art committee displayed remarkable unanimity in balloting on paintings to meet the indefinable requirement of the chosen theme--that they be masterpieces. But it was plainly a task for taste--and thus one that would have been cheerfully shared by the woman in whose memory the benefit collection was organized, New York City Art Patron and Philanthropist Adele Rosenwald Levy, who died 13 months ago.

"Write on my tombstone," Mrs. Levy once jokingly told her husband. Child Psychiatrist David M. Levy: " 'Here lies my dear wife; she never minded her own business.' " Minding Mrs. Levy's business became a self-imposed posthumous duty of her fellow art lovers. They have written an eloquent epitaph.

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