Art: 'Buy American' was his guideline

When Charles K. Williams II graduated from Princeton University in 1953, a collection of American art comparable to the one he has formed over nearly three decades would have been an anomaly.

Americans were slow to acknowledge their own art history, and consequently until the mid-20th century collectors were more likely to acquire works by famous Europeans.

Williams not only collects American art, he does so in a way that catalogs its development systematically, particularly as far as modernism is concerned.

Visitors to the exhibition of his collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will encounter just about every important American artist who worked between the turn of the 20th century and the advent of abstract expressionism in the late 1940s.

At least it seemed so to me. As I went through the galleries, I tried to think of artists of reputation that Williams had missed and began to wonder if, like a bird-watcher on a field trip, he was working from a checklist, ticking off each new acquisition that filled a gap in his life list.

Even if that's how this collection came together, it represents a major achievement. It offers a historical synopsis of a kind that I wish had existed when I took my first art-history course, back in the late Cretaceous. In those days, students were encouraged to admire the pioneering European modernists; Americans were considered derivative and second-rate.

The bulk of the museum show of about 100 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper focuses on American modernism, but not exclusively, for Williams follows his eye and his instincts, not a rigid program. There's also a gallery of realists and even a few works by Europeans such as Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Giacometti, and Emil Nolde.

The presence in the collection of narrative painters such as Thomas Hart Benton, Isabel Bishop, Paul Cadmus, Rockwell Kent, Reginald Marsh, and Kenneth Hayes Miller alludes to the great schism in American art during the 1920s and '30s that produced movements philosophically contrary to modernism, particularly regionalism and social realism.

Regionalists such as Benton and Grant Wood rejected European-inspired modernism in favor of subjects drawn from American life. Instead of formalist theorizing, they emphasized storytelling. Williams owns some prime examples, among them Benton's Adam-and-Eve allegory, The Apple of Discord, one of several promised gifts.

(The full magnitude of the modernism-realism schism emerges at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown in a show drawn from the Philadelphia-area collection of Lee and Barbara Maimon. "Painting the People," to be discussed in this space next Sunday, is smaller than the Williams exhibition, and not so star-studded, but it's just as appealing.)

The scope, acuity, and impressive overall quality of the Williams collection indicates that it was assembled by someone with a practiced eye and independent means. Williams' grandfather, after whom he's named, operated an extensive and profitable mineral-pigments business in Easton, Pa., with a branch in Missouri.

The future collector, an Easton native, earned two degrees at Princeton, the second in architecture in 1956. However, designing buildings subsequently gave way to archaeology as a career; Williams earned a doctorate in that field at the University of Pennsylvania.

As director emeritus of the Corinth excavations of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, he lives part of each year in Greece and part in Philadelphia.

An emeritus overseer of Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, he has been a major university benefactor, endowing a chair in Roman architecture and giving $16 million to a campaign to upgrade and expand the university museum.

He began collecting prints in the 1980s, eventually acquiring about 150 examples of works by 19th- and 20th-century American and European artists from Whistler and Hopper to Manet and Millet. A selection of prime specimens, which Williams has given to the museum, has been installed in the corridor adjacent to the main exhibition.

Curator Innes Howe Shoemaker has made the main hanging easier to digest by creating thematic groupings. Besides the realist section, there's a splendid wall devoted to precisionists such as Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford and a cubist wall featuring Max Weber, Jan Matulka, and Jean Crotti.

Now and again one comes across a strikingly unusual work, such as a luminous red nude by Milton Avery, almost a pure color-field abstraction; the machine-inspired Gear by Arthur Dove; and a dark, thickly impastoed waterfall landscape by John Singer Sargent (a partial and promised gift), none of which look anything like what one expects from these artists.

The artists that Williams seems to favor by owning several works speak to sophisticated taste. Fans of Oscar Bluemner, George Ault, Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth, and Dove will be pleased to discover that he shares their affection.

I was especially pleased to encounter a pastel still life by Preston Dickinson, an artist who, like Bluemner, has been underappreciated, and an abstraction by Philadelphian Morton Schamberg.

Schamberg's landscape, which restructures nature, seems to be the kind of abstraction that Williams prefers; that is, the ostensible subject is usually recognizable. It's also a vibrantly colorful image, which is consistent with his predilection for chromatic power.

Nothing in this exhibition is likely to render you breathless, yet the level of quality is consistently high, with no sharp peaks and valleys. The scale of most works is appropriately domestic, as befits art that is lived with. The collection's range is perhaps its most impressive quality; there's a whole art-history course to savor here.

However, the installation doesn't present the collection as a linear history lesson. The emphasis, both with the object labels and in the catalog, is on individual artists. Visitors who know something of the period probably will find the show more enlightening and satisfying than those who come to it cold.

As noted, Williams has given some of these works to the museum and formally promised others. He has indicated that eventually the museum will receive the entire collection by bequest. When that happens, the Art Museum's American holdings will be enhanced significantly.

"Adventures in Modern Art: The Charles K. Williams II Collection" remains on view in the Dorrance galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and the Parkway, through Sept. 13. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays and to 8:45 p.m. Fridays. Admission is $16 general, $14 for visitors 65 and older, and $12 for students with ID and visitors 13 to 18. Pay what you wish first Sunday of the month. Information: 215-763-8100, 215-684-7500 or www.philamuseum.org.

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