Monsieur Georges

When the noted international art dealer Georges Wildenstein was 14 years old, his father. Nathan, gave him two small works of art that were to become more precious to him than all the masterpieces that he later bought and sold. The gifts were illuminated miniatures that had originally been pages in a late 15th century manuscript, and they were the start of what is today the world's biggest and best private collection. Last week 70 items from that collection were on public display at the Cloisters, the way-uptown adjunct of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some are less than 3 in. in height; none are more than 24 in. All glitter with the gemlike colors that they had when their usually anonymous creators made them.

Just why he decided to collect miniatures rather than any other type of art, Wildenstein, now 70, cannot really explain. "I just like--no, I love them," he says. His collection lines the walls of his residences in Paris and in Manhattan, and each item is treated with as much affection as if it were the only one he possessed. Smiling genially behind his glasses, Wildenstein will suddenly get up from his chair, grab a visitor by the arm and begin steering him around the room. "Look at this," he will say, pointing to an illumination by the 16th century Italian artist Giorgio-Giulio Clovio. "It's a beauty. When one looks at a beautiful painting, il faut jouir, one should be enraptured.''

Every Week to the Louvre. In the world of art, Georges Wildenstein--or "Monsieur Georges," as he is known to his galleries in Paris, Manhattan, London and Buenos Aires--is an awesome figure who probably knows more about the peregrinations of Europe's masterpieces than any man alive. But it is not just his huge file of photographs or his unparalleled collection of auction catalogues, or even his incredible memory, that accounts for his ability to spot a fake or dismiss a work of mediocrity within the blink of an eyelid. His father, who fled his native Alsace when the Prussians swarmed through it in 1870 and started the secondhand store in Paris from which the great art empire grew, put his son through a highly personal and rigorous training. When Georges was seven, his father would hold up an object and demand: "is it beautiful or is it ugly?" Georges spent his youth in Europe's museums and galleries, "looking, looking, looking. And I still go to the Louvre at least once a week when I'm in Paris, to keep up with the great masters."

His miniatures do not come from any one period: though the art form flourished from the 12th to the 16th centuries, he owns some that date as late as the 18th century. "I simply buy the most beautiful things I can find," he says. The miniatures come from medieval books of songs, proverbs and prayers, or from the great Books of Hours. Though most portray religious subjects, there are scenes from the history of Troy and the works of Aristotle, even a scene showing Caesar receiving a German ambassador. Since the miniatures were never exposed to light as much as ordinary paintings, they furnish an especially vivid record of the medieval mind. One can almost hear the dogs yelping in the boar hunt of Louis Malet, Sire de Graville and Grand Admiral of France. The golden Flagellation, done around 1350, shows the medieval struggle with the problems of perspective, while the exquisite Crucifixion, painted nearly a century later by an artisan in the workshop of the master of the Rohan Hours, has a deep landscape background with towns in the distance.

Abstractionism Is Horror. Wildenstein is not a man without prejudices. He once owned 250 Picassos,but he got rid of them because he could not stand the way the world's greatest living painter paints. As for today's abstractionists, "they have created horrors. There is no individuality in abstract art. It is all a monumental error."

Wildenstein's own credo has brought him a fortune, but it has also brought him unsurpassed joy. "If you want to learn and to love art," he told a visitor last week, "go and see the great masters. Go and see them as often as you can. When you can feel them, hear them, touch them with your mind, turn their colors over and over on your tongue--then you will begin to understand."

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