$1 Billion in Annenberg Art for N.Y.

Walter H. Annenberg, publisher, philanthropist and former ambassador to Great Britain, has decided to bequeath his celebrated art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The collection of more than 50 paintings, which is one of the most valuable in private hands, is said to be worth about $1 billion.

“It’s a stupendous event. We are overwhelmed by the gesture,” William H. Luers, president of the museum, said in a telephone interview.

The bequest includes works by major Impressionist and modern artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne. Works of similar quality have been sold for millions of dollars apiece--in some cases tens of millions--at auctions in recent years.

Among the most highly prized pieces in the Annenberg collection are Van Gogh’s “Vase of Roses” and “La Berceuse,” a portrait of a stern woman rocking a cradle. The auction record for a Van Gogh is $82.5 million, paid last May by Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito for “Portrait of Dr. Gachet.”

Also included in the bequest is “Au Lapin Agile,” Pablo Picasso’s melancholy painting of a harlequin and a female companion in a Parisian bar. Annenberg purchased the Picasso for $40.7 million in 1989 at a highly publicized New York auction.

Luers said that Annenberg had thought long and hard about choosing a permanent home for his collection: “My sense of it is that Walter Annenberg is very fond of his collection. He wants it to be well taken care of after he is gone, and he wants it to be seen by millions of people in a public institution that will display and promote its aesthetic quality.”

Noting that many institutions had vied for the collection, Luers said the Metropolitan is “honored to have been chosen” from a field of worthy contenders.

Annenberg, 82, had indicated that he would donate his collection to a major museum, rather than sell it or pass it on to family members, but he had declined to name the recipient until Monday. Art world speculation had narrowed the field of likely candidates to three: the Metropolitan, where Annenberg has served as a trustee; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which some observers thought he would favor as a patriotic gesture, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art near his longtime home in Pennsylvania.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was mentioned as a dark-horse candidate because the collection was shown there and because Annenberg has housed the collection in Southern California, at his estate in Rancho Mirage.

The Met will display the collection together in galleries that will be refurbished and revised to accommodate the Annenberg paintings, Luers said. “He wants his collection to stay together as a whole, and that is how we will show it,” he said.

Visitors to the museum will get a preview of the bequest from May through September, when the Met will host a traveling exhibition of the collection. The popular exhibition debuted in Philadelphia last spring, then moved on to the National Gallery in Washington and to Los Angeles, where it was on view last fall.

The exhibition was so well received in Los Angeles that visitors were required to buy advance tickets for a designated day and hour. Prior to the exhibition, Annenberg said that he had allowed the collection to go on a national tour so that he could share his paintings with all the people who wanted to see them.

Annenberg began collecting art about 30 years ago and he took great delight in showing his collection to visitors at his desert home in Rancho Mirage. Heads of state and Republican dignitaries, including former President Ronald Reagan, are frequently entertained by the Annenbergs.

Leading visitors on a tour of his prized pictures, Annenberg would point out formal and psychological qualities of the works that he had observed. He would note, for example, that the pointed shapes of drapery in a Cezanne still life were echoed in the artist’s landscapes. In the case of “Portrait of Women,” a richly colored painting by Paul Gauguin, he commented that the picture was actually a portrait of a daughter’s innocence and her mother’s world-weary wisdom.

Critics and curators have praised the Annenberg collection for its uniformly high quality, fine condition and evidence of personal taste. While Annenberg owns many works by leading artists, he has sometimes chosen rather unusual examples. He has also bought fine pieces by lesser known artists such as Eugene Boudin. He has often collected in depth, amassing a variety of pieces by such artists as Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Monet.

Annenberg founded TV Guide magazine in 1953 and watched it grow to a circulation of 17 million before he sold it to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for $3 billion in 1988. He and his wife, Leonore, who was White House protocol chief during the first term of President Reagan, have been prominent patrons of the arts for many years.