Katherine S. Dreier Presents Vast Collection of Modern Art to Yale

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and Trumbull, had passed to be revived by later and more patriotic generations.

Studied In Paris

Miss Dreier studied in Paris for two years with Raphael Colin, who did among other opi, murals for the Opera Comique. "He had," she says, "a lovely cool sense of color."

Later she studied in Munich with Gustav Britsch, the great art educator of Germany, who revolutionized art education in that country. The first thing she did was a mural for St. Paul's school, Garden City.

There were later to come portraits from her hand which had something of the charm of Burne-Jones, though she would repudiate that similitude; the dazzling portrait of Gadski now in the Berlin home of her daughter.

Gadski who will be forever remembered for that night performance in Yale's then new Bowl, when she sang the "Valkyrie" in such glamor and glimmer and romance as has been described by Gertrude Atherton in "The Ivory Tower" story of the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria who had opera

performed in his forest retreat, at night by the glow of the moon and tiny artificial lights. Ludwig was a brother of the ill-fated Carlotta, empress of Mexico.

Then the inevitable jaunt to Europe, three years in London, for Katherine Dreier, where she lived in Whistler's and Oscar Wilde's Tite street, received treasured commendation from John Singer Sargent for "her blues, the finest he had ever seen." "Sargent," she says, "was an extremely shy man, which people did not appreciate. They thought him cold and aloof, which gave an impression of a frigid dignity which was merely exterior." She had met the American painter at the home of Elizabeth Robins, the American actress, not to be confused with Pennell's wife, Elizabeth Robins.

They had all participated in that Yellow period era of glamor and Bohemianism in London, when Beardsley, "the brilliant boy" and Oscar Wilde and Whistler were making the scene merry and daring and romantic, as Londoners had never had them since Shakespeare.

Ibsen Newly Discovered

The literary world was then mesmerized by the newly discovered

Ibsen, and Elizabeth Robins had staged "Little Eyelof" which Alla Nazimova first played in this country. Mrs. Pat Campbell, whose last tragic entrance upon the stage she embellished, was in the Plymouth Playhouse in Milford, and Forbes Robertson, father of Vincent Shean's wife, and Pinero, were figures in that eerie world, and Bernard Shawa, a scrawny and ill-fed stripling, of on reputation, was writing drama and music criticisms for the notorious Frank Harris's brilliant Saturday Review.

Miss Dreier should write a book of her life, but we don't suppose she has ever bothered to think about herself to that extent.

A vivacious conversationalist, an omniverous reader, since childhood, her library is extensive. Democratic, warm, affectionate and kindly, she is easily one of the grand dames of the countryside, who will be presently preoccupied with plans for turning her home into a museum, so that with this and other cultural activities, like Sullivan's music shed, Fairfield county will become the cultural center of Connecticut, if not all New England.

A treasured memento of Whistler, former Stonington boy, is the

first drawing he ever did, given to Miss Dreier by the artist's sister, Mrs. Emerson Palmer. She also possesses, as a gift from Mrs. Palmer, Whistler's scrap book.

Incidentally Miss Elizabeth Robins' brother married Miss Dreier's sister, Mrs. Margaret Dreier Robins, active, like Mary, in trade union movements.

Story of Yale's Acceptance

Why did this so valued collection, which only time will decide its value whether erratic or fundamental, but at least phasal, come to Yale? There is a story to that, too.

Miss Dreier abandoned classicism after the Armory show of 1913 and until 1918 studied the new movement and has herself done significant work in it. Interested in it were the Whites of Brooklyn, of which family Henry White, fore-runner in better housing, in New York; came. The late Mrs. Henry White of New Haven, whose husband was a member of Bristol and White, was a sister of the late John Christopher Schwab, librarian of Yale. In his youth he was called Christopher Schwab. New Havens knew him as John Schwab.

Miss Dreier's father was a close friend in Brooklyn of Christopher

Schwab, father of John C. and Mrs. Henry White. Miss Dreier frequently talked in Mrs. White's New Haven home on abstractionism. So it was natural that the collection of the Societe Anonyme should go to Yale, particularly because the new president, Dr. Seymour had a sympathy for it, which possibly was not shared by art school administrators, outside of Theodore Sizer. President Seymour's son is curator of one of the Washington museums, who may have exerted some sympathetic pressure upon his father for the new art.

Miss Dreier would like to bridge the gap of the years by bringing together primitives and abstractions. Yale has already bridged it in her collection . . . . the bridge which leads from the Jarves Italian primitives to the ultimate and apogee of the modern abstractionism.

Apropos of all this is the fact that there are few collections of abstracts in America. There is Walter Arnsberg's which is to be housed in Los Angeles; John Quin's went in auction; Davies sold his at private sale and the Societe Anonyme collection, most complete in the world, is now housed in Yale,