By Jo Ann Lewis
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, March 2, 2000; Page C01

Consider the risk: For 30 years, one by one, you collect the best American modernist paintings (1913-45) money can buy--O'Keeffes, Hoppers and Sheelers when you can get them, and Aults, Guglielmis and Slobodkinas when you can't. You figure someday you'll give them all to an unspecified museum.

But first, the ultimate test--museums want to take a harder look. And the best paintings are removed from the walls of your sunken living room and cozy den and shipped off to the National Gallery of Art, where they're hung like Old Masters in six tall galleries usually reserved for such crowd-pleasers as Calder and Gauguin.

Can these paintings--many still scorned as knockoffs of European avant-gardists like Picasso, Braque and Mondrian--survive such public scrutiny?

Just such a collection--"Twentieth-Century American Art: The Ebsworth Collection"--goes on view Sunday in the National Gallery East Building. And, chances are, it will change a lot of musty preconceptions.

This isn't the first time St. Louis travel tycoon Barney Ebsworth's collection has been subjected to the museum test. In 1987 there was an exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum and then one in Honolulu. But much has changed since then, including major acquisitions that expand the collection well beyond its original parameters, which covered American modernist painting from the 1913 Armory Show to World War II.

The collection now also encompasses postwar masters such as Gorky, Pollock, de Kooning, Johns and Rauschenberg, who finally put American art on the world map. There are also some large showpieces that Ebsworth may have felt were needed to bolster public presentation of his collection, among them Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup With Can Opener" (1962), Wayne Thiebaud's delicious, frosting-slathered "Bakery Counter" (1962) and David Hockney's gigantic portrait "Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott" (1968-69), which hangs in Ebsworth's office.

"I haven't abandoned American modernism; it abandoned me," says Ebsworth as he walks through his show, explaining his newly expanded purview. "I can no longer find paintings from the period that are good enough. And I want only the best."

Trim, sunned and recently retired from INTRAV, the luxury travel and cruise ship business he sold to a Swiss firm for $115 million, Barney Ebsworth, 66, flew in this week from his winter digs in Honolulu to celebrate what is, in effect, his international coming-out party. For though he's known to American museum curators as a potential lender--and is now listed among the world's top 100 or 200 collectors of American art--he has, until now, kept a low public profile.

And it's never been clear exactly what he owns--apart from his most famous paintings, starting with Edward Hopper's dreamy, nostalgic scene of two women seated in a Chinese restaurant, titled "Chop Suey" (1929). A standout even in the Whitney Museum's recent "American Century" show, that painting was also shown here at the National Museum of American Art in 1993, along with several other Ebsworth masterworks by Marsden Hartley, Charles Sheeler, Arthur Dove and Joseph Stella. Ebsworth is a longtime supporter and former commissioner of NMAA.

But now, for the first time, the whole collection is out for the world to see and for museum curators to start dreaming and drooling over. Some of the National Gallery's dreams have already come true: Ebsworth and his wife, Pam, revealed this week that they are giving three paintings to the gallery, including Dove's darkly romantic, nature-inspired "Moon" (1935) and Sheeler's precisionist masterpiece "Classic Landscape" (1931), a sleek, machine-age painting of the Ford Motor Co.'s then-new River Rouge assembly plant near Detroit, where the Model A was built. The painting is based on a Sheeler watercolor that Ebsworth bought long ago, thinking he could never own the painting. The watercolor and the painting hang together in this show, both inspired by Sheeler's earlier photographs of the new Ford plant, which he'd been commissioned to take for advertising purposes.

Ebsworth has served on the National Gallery's Trustee Council and co-chaired its Collectors Committee since 1996, and he has made other gifts to the institution, including Georgia O'Keeffe's "Black White and Blue," one of his two important O'Keeffe abstract paintings. He has also donated a work by contemporary American artist Pat Steir and paid for the purchase of another for the museum. At last night's opening, he was to announce yet another gift--the huge, enigmatic painting "Tree" (1962), by the African American artist Bob Thompson, who died in 1966 at age 29.

Scrubbed Honesty

It should be said up front that there is nothing grandiose about this show or the 74 paintings and the handful of sculptures in it. Rather, the lesser-known works--like Ebsworth himself--project a sense of scrubbed honesty, eagerness and open-mindedness that, coupled with their generally high quality, gives them a fresh and captivating strength.

Like every collector, Ebsworth favors what he calls A-plus pictures by A-plus artists such as Hopper and Sheeler. But he has also discovered great pleasures among what he calls the A-plus pictures by B-plus abstract artists. These include abstractions by Jean Xceron, who worked as a custodian at the Guggenheim Museum and had a studio amid Kandinsky's paintings, and Suzy Frelinghuysen--a New York City Opera soprano--who made sophisticated Braque-like compositions incorporating corrugated cardboard. And Esphyr Slobodkina, better known as a children's book author, whose handsome abstraction "Ancient Sea Song (Large Picture)" (1943-45) hangs over the Ebsworths' bed.

Then there's Byron Browne, whose mostly white, cubist-derived abstraction "Classical Still Life" (1936) manages to hold its own in the very first gallery, even though it's up against stunners like Marsden Hartley's "Painting No. 49, Berlin" (1914-15), a blaring symbolic homage to a German-officer friend killed in action in 1914.

Browne's painting--like so many works here--clearly had its roots in the cubism of Braque, Picasso and Gris, making it typical of many of the American modernist abstractions painted after the Armory Show. It was that exhibition that introduced European avant-garde art to America, and many Americans tried to join the stylistic revolution, or went off to Europe to learn from the masters.

It took 30 more years for American painting to find its own unique identity in abstract expressionism after World War II. And it was this largely unexplored--and long disdained--30-year interim that Ebsworth's collection set out to reexamine. Looking at these works today, many of them for the first time, who could fail to see their freshness and sincerity? And who can now dismiss them, as history has done, merely because they pursued the new rather than inventing it?

But American modernism as revealed in this show is also very wide-ranging and goes beyond abstraction to include figurative and surrealist paintings as well. But apart from the political surrealist O. Louis Guglielmi, whose work includes a haunting warning about fascism destroying the Brooklyn Bridge, it is the little-known abstract artists here who are the big surprise.

A European Eye

Ebsworth's interest in art began in Paris, where he was stationed during the Korean War. "I willed myself to France," he says, "and that's where I ended up." While there, he married and spent every weekend at the Louvre. "Even as late as 1970, I'm not sure I knew Hopper or O'Keeffe, and I was skeptical of abstraction. I came to American art with a European eye."

As he prospered in the travel business, Ebsworth began buying 16th- and 17th-century Dutch paintings and 18th-century Japanese scrolls. But that ended abruptly after a 1972 visit to Rotterdam.

"I was getting into the shipping business, and was taken by the owner of the Holland America line to see the collection of his uncle, who later founded the Boymans Museum. There were 17 Rembrandts! I thought to myself, 'You don't speak Dutch, and the great pictures are gone. I'll have to focus my collecting better.' "

With the help of Charles Buckley, then director of the St. Louis Art Museum, Ebsworth focused on American modernism, then a collecting field of relatively new interest. His first acquisition is the only really old-fashioned-looking painting in this show: a 1914 portrait by "Ashcan" painter William Glackens that looks like a Renoir. Ebsworth's next purchase, a fine little 1913 Andrew Dasburg "Landscape," recalls Cezanne.

"The best is the only thing I'm interested in," he recalls telling Buckley. "But first I had to learn what the best was. Charles helped me refine what I was going to do. We went to New York, and he introduced me to the best dealers: Stuart Feld, Joan Washburn, Annette Krashaar, Virginia Zabriskie: He put me on a safe footing by introducing me to people with great intellect, including curators."

Today, he says, his chief requirement for buying a picture is "love and lust."

The dicey subject of what Ebsworth ultimately will do with his collection is raised, and he says it has always been one that he wouldn't discuss. "But you get to be a certain age . . .

"This was formed as a museum collection from the start," he says. "And I've been giving things away all along." He then lists the favored few: "I've given to the St. Louis Art Museum, the Honolulu Academy of Art, the National Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Seattle Art Museum and the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, in honor of Charles Buckley."

He says he's never considered building his own museum: "No museums, no wings, no stipulations on what I give. My gifts are all unconditional--except, of course, I don't want the works to be sold.

"I'll see what happens," he concludes. "I'm not going to sell them, that's for sure."