COLIN EISLER
"Gold-Ground Art" and the Cold War :
Solving the Great Kress Mystery
J
ust why the major American merchant, Samuel H. Kress
(I863-I955),
a Lutheran, teeped himself in the most Catholic art
work of Italy, buying and warehousing it in wholesale quantities
between
I927
and
I94I,
has long remained a mystery. The seventieth
anniversary of his Foundation (established
I929),
and the sixtieth for his
monumental donation of art works, accepted by President Roosevelt for
the National Gallery of Art at its dedication on March 17th,
I94I,
were
celebrated recently, recalling the donor's surprising interest in such art.
About fifty years ago, Kress initiated a revolutionary program of arts–
giving, distributing about three thousand examples of earlier European
painting and sculpture for permanent exhibition in ninety-six regional
galleries, colleges, and civic in titutions throughout the country. These
works were often sent to place where no remotely comparable art had
ever before been seen, such a Birmingham, Alabama. This "share the
art-wealth" program was initiated with gifts to such regional galleries
as Tucson's in
I95
I.
Major recipients of Kress largesse were often cities
with Kress stores.
It
pleased him that these sources of his wealth should
be so rewarded.
The Foundation's goals included the restoration of European monu–
ments, such as the bomb-battered churches of Nuremberg-the Kress
family's city of origin until the mid-eighteenth century. Funds went to
the conservation of the great Mantuan Renaissance pleasure palace so
much admired by Sam, along with many other threatened or damaged
monuments. Art scholarship as well as conservation studies remain
among the Foundation's present-day concerns and subsidies .
Unparalleled in scope and grandeur in American art philanthropy,
Sam's vast donation of painting, sculpture, decorative and graphic arts,
along with ongoing funding for related interests, make the Kress bene–
faction among the most original, memorable, and monumental of all
gifts, related in spirit to the funding provided by the Englishman James
Smithson for his Washington Institution in
I846.
But Kress's donation
was only possible within a nation of imperial size, by
~
donor of almost
