MURIEL KALLIS STEINBERG NEWMAN (1914–2008)

Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman, the doyenne of Chicago modern art collectors, died of natural causes on Friday, reports Alan Artner in the Chicago Tribune_. “She truly let works of art change her life,” said James Rondeau, curator of the department of contemporary art at the Art Institute. “She had a very defined moment [to her collecting], from about 1948 to [the time of] Color Field painting. But that never limited her interest or support. She was an aesthetic polyglot with an enormously gifted eye.” She and her first husband, Jay Steinberg, visited New York several times a year, buying works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and others, now recognized as masterpieces. With her second husband, Albert Newman, she traveled to new, far-flung places, adding many Asian, African, and Oceanic pieces to her American and European collection. The display of ethnographic art and body adornments with modern Western painting and sculpture is now commonplace. But Newman unified everything with the strength of a personality that was unafraid to go against the grain, as she did when, in the late 1970s, she promised her greatest works not to the Art Institute but to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which received sixty-three pieces in total from Newman. The interpretation usually offered was that Newman had responded to anti-Semitism at the Art Institute. But she denied this, saying her decision was in reaction to John Maxon, the Art Institute’s vice president in charge of collections, who had expressed contempt for most art of the twentieth century. After Maxon’s death and during the long directorship of James N. Wood, she gave the Art Institute more than 170 works, including, most recently, a major late painting by Jasper Johns.