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PARTISAN REVIEW
publications, exhaustive catalogues, and handsome commemorative
books have indeed appeared for the entire collection. Yet these cannot
quite do justice to Kress's amazing feat . Hopefully, the far-flung works
will at long last emerge
in toto,
their new museum housed on paper.
Only then can so phenomenal a gathering be appreciated in all its mind–
and eye-boggling achievement, as a museological feat of incomparable
magnitude. Had his vast collection been kept together, it would have
constituted the western world's most extensive, extraordinarily well–
balanced, independent, and individual survey of Italian art (with other
works) from the late middle ages through the eighteenth century.
Recently reinstalled, the Birmingham Art Museum's Kress Gallery pro–
vides a model of local appreciation for such a uniquely welcome if com–
plex gift. Of late, mega-museums and their blockbuster exhibitions have
become increasingly unwalkable, unseeable, and unassimilable. By
escaping individual overkill, avoiding monopoly by a single institution,
and distributing art throughout an appreciative nation, the complex,
challenging character of the Kress gift may prove all for the best, very
much in keeping with the donor's sharp eye and original vision.
The synergy between the high quality of his store's merchandise and
that of his collection, distributed to local museums in the same cities,
reinforced one another. Commercially, aesthetically, politically, and
financially-from foundation tax benefits-proximity of Kress mer–
chandise to Kress art served a multiple agenda of unusual complexity
and unique efficiency.
