70
PARTISAN REVIEW
wider market. Ever cost-cutting and parsimonious, Kress went on to
staggering commercial success. By
1929
(when his Foundation was
established "to promote the welfare and progress of the human race,"
with forty percent of the voting stock) he bought the land and built
more than two hundred stores with handsomely Deco, neo-Gothic, or
Renaissance facades. Annual sales were close to
70
million dollars.
Bachelor Kress could easily afford living within a quasi-Hearstian decor
at his roomy Fifth Avenue duplex penthouse (to be inherited by his
brother Rush). Its interior, cast along minor league Medici lines,
included some of that family's finest paintings.
With Sam's health fading, Rush continued his brother's passion for
collecting art. But his direction of the business was far less fortunate.
Major amassing of Kress art took place in years of the Depression and
of post-World War II European despair, periods when the dollar was
king and many major works, dislodged from long-term continental
ownership, were sold at bargain prices. This was the last time that a
great collection of European sculpture and painting could be formed.
The best Kress statuary remains in Washington, wisely selected by
Charles Seymour Jr., the Gallery'S first curator; the rest are distributed
throughout the country.
Impressed by a fellow Pennsylvanian's magnificent gallery, that of
Henry Clay Frick, Sam first contemplated establishing a comparable
one on Fifth Avenue, supposedly buying a similar avenue block front for
this purpose. But the hundred halls of Washington'S brand new Mellon
Gallery-just completed as the "world's largest marble building" and
soon suitably re-baptized "The National Gallery of Art"-presented a
yawning void. Only a few of the Gallery'S spaces could be filled, these
with the almost uniformly splendid paintings donated by Andrew Mel–
lon and by the even better ones given by the Philadelphia street-car czar
Peter A. B. Widener. Son of a Civil War butcher, he dwelled in such regal
splendor in the Main Line's hundred-room Lynnewood Hall that his for–
mer palace now accommodates an entire college. Both these Pennsyl–
vanian capitalists' lavish styles contrasted with Kress's relatively quiet,
yacht-free ways.
Pressure was successfully placed upon Sam in
1939
to surrender his
dream of a museum all his own, to give the pick of his collection to the
National Gallery. The gift was accepted at its opening on Saint Patrick's
Day by President Roosevelt. Kress would himself be President of the
National Gallery for the last decade of his life
(1946-55).
All too appro–
priately, the initial director of what was first known as the Mellon
Gallery was none other than its donor's private secretary. Though igno-
