Author Description

Once again, as in recent years, generous donors and patrons are mainly responsible for the Museum's acquisitions of major art works in 1984–85. The Metropolitan's own unrestricted purchase funds have been so outdistanced by soaring prices for works of art during the last decade that without the magnanimity and generosity of the Museum's friends, this year's group of new acquisitions would be of minor importance. 1984–85 was the year of twentieth-century art in regard to notable acquisitions. One bequest in this area is so large and so significant that it dominates all the Museum's other acquisitions for the year. Scofield Thayer, the pioneer collector of modern art and editor in chief of The Dial, a magazine of arts and letters founded in 1919, bequeathed to the Metropolitan his entire collection of more than five hundred works of art, a collection he formed between 1919 and 1924. The Dial provided a distinguished forum for avant-garde writers and critics—among them, e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Virginia Woolf—as well as furnished its pages for the reproduction of the works of art that Thayer specifically acquired for publication in his magazine. The Scofield Thayer bequest includes a constellation of thirty-eight works on paper by Egon Schiele, three prints and four paintings by Henri Matisse, twenty-three paintings and works on paper by Pablo Picasso, and thirty-five sculptures and drawings by Gaston Lachaise. Other remarkable acquisitions in the field of twentieth-century art entered the Museum's collection in the past year. Heinz Berggruen, the foremost collector of the art of Paul Klee, one of the most original and influential artists of this century, gave to the Museum ninety paintings and drawings by that artist, three of which are reproduced in this publication. The Berggruen gift has provided the Metropolitan with a group of Klee's works that is not a random selection but is, rather, a