The Collectors: Three Vignettes

People buy art for all reasons and with all incomes. Broadly, however, they fall into three categories: the amateur, who appreciates beautiful objects for their own sake; the investor, who is primarily intent on making money; and the rare great collector, who assembles treasures on the grand scale that enriches society. Three vignettes:

The Addicted Amateur With gray-black locks dangling in ringlets over his black velvet jacket, Stuart Pivar, 49, resembles an apparition from one of the dark Victorian paintings of which he is an avid collector. A New Yorker who owns several plastics companies, he accumulates paintings and bronzes because "there is nothing more exciting than to have great objects of art around." He concentrates on 19th century academics, pre-Raphaelites and symbolists, because at the time he began collecting 20 years ago they cost relatively little. Hofstra-educated Pivar has steeped himself in his field since then, reading exhaustively and traveling to important auctions around the world. Says he: "To be a knowledgeable collector of 19th century painting you have to be a mythologist as well as a historian. Being a collector turns you into an aesthete, a financier, a voyager, a voyeur and a scholar."

Pivar, who already owns canvases by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Bouguereau and Burne-Jones, is constantly expanding his collection, which is already far too large to display in his cavernous two-story bachelor apartment off Manhattan's Central Park. He concedes that his paintings of diabolic winged creatures, furiously driven chariots and diaphanously clad maidens are basically "decor," adding: "You are not supposed to look at the paintings, they look "at you. The art puts out the energy." Anything that produces energy these days should be profitable, of course, and Pivar's collection is no exception. "Since I started to collect," he says with satisfaction, "19th century painting has increased tenfold in value. It can still go another tenfold."

The Happy Investors For Atlanta's Noel and Kathy Wadsworth, investing in art is a full-time occupation. Last April, Wadsworth, 43, sold his thriving 20-year-old carpet plant in Dalton, Ga., in order to concentrate on what had been the couple's consuming interest: collecting French and American impressionists. "We've always been interested in art, and we'd always bought local artists," he explains. "Then, five or six years ago, we just had a yearning for artists who were names in books, fine art, artists who were dead."

Though they have consistently bought only "paintings we would want to hang in our house," they are aware that investing in art requires, perhaps more than taste, extensive scholarship and close scrutiny of market trends. Working out of an elegant house overlooking the Chattahoochee River, Wadsworth spends two full days a week keeping up with art news, studying auction and gallery catalogues, digging into reference works. Together the Wadsworths attend auctions and visit galleries in New York, Paris and London. "We try for a unified theme," says Wadsworth, who studied industrial design at Auburn. "But we have a broad range. We view the art as our portfolio, just as people invest in stocks and bonds." While they have put most of their funds into collecting, they can now finance new purchases by selling paintings that have appreciated in value. In their first year as investors they expect to turn over at least 100 works. Retracing his rugs-to-riches career, Wadsworth says happily: "My banker called me up the other day and asked, 'How does it feel for a boy who started out in business over a hairdressing salon in Dalton to have a $100,000 credit line at Christie's and Sotheby Parke Bernet?' " Wadsworth's answer: "I never dreamed you could make a living doing something you really like to do."

The Doyenne of Collectors Houston's Dominique de Menil is one of the last of several species: the rich, eclectic collector, the magnanimous donor, the astute organizer, the impassioned evangelist of art and other humane causes. She is 71, a widow, fine-boned, blue-eyed, white-haired and inexhaustible. She and her husband Jean came to Texas from Paris like Picasso doves in 1941, landing in Oil town when it was a provincial community consecrated to Babbittry, segregation and crude. Later, the couple got Architect Philip Johnson to design a house for them and then helped to refine Houston.

Mrs. de Menil is the heiress-daughter of Conrad Schlumberger, an Alsatian who with his brother Marcel developed an electronic logging device used in virtually all oil exploration. Her husband, the son of a French baron, was chairman of Schlumberger Ltd.; he died in 1973. Houston was the company's North American headquarters. Mrs. de Menil bought her first artwork, a lithograph of Picasso's Famille des Saltimbanques, when she was 28. She followed up by acquiring what may be the world's biggest private collection of surrealists, notably De Chirico, Klee, Magritte and Ernst, the latter alone represented by hundreds of works. Her collection extends to Neolithic, Cycladic, Byzantine, Celtic, Roman, African and Eurasian works. She has also amassed a unique photo archive called Images of the Black in Western Art, as well as sculptures and paintings of blacks.

Her largely unsung contributions to the American art scene are extraordinary. Since the first show she assembled and brought to Houston in 1951--24 Van Goghs--the transplanted Frenchwoman (a U.S. citizen since 1962) has organized dozens of imaginative exhibitions, many of which have traveled from Houston to major museums in the U.S. and abroad. Says she: "We could have built the Eiffel Tower for what has gone into those shows." She personally runs and funds Rice University's Institute for the Arts and the Menil Foundation, which contributes to cultural, art and ecumenical projects, as well as such valuable enterprises as catalogues raisonnes on Ernst and Magritte. She also commissioned and gave to Houston the Rothko Chapel, an octagonal building dominated by the late abstractionist's dark and pulsating paintings. The chapel is used for interfaith religious gatherings and international conferences on the humanities.

The big question in Houston is whether the doyenne's collection will be bequeathed to that city, which is not artistically overendowed. Or will it go to France? In a rare interview, Mrs. de Menil told TIME that she does indeed hope to will her treasures to Houston, and is even planning a unique building to house them. Her dream, she says, is to have "a museum tailored to a collection and also in keeping with the times in which we're living." She adds: "I'd be heartbroken to see it dispersed." She makes clear, however, that she cannot finance it alone. That makes it Houston's turn.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.