PAULINE SHULMAN, Designer:  1905-1960     (view obituary)           EVERYWHERE, PICTURES Home of Mrs. Pauline D. Shulman has paintings on every wall, even on center chimney of living room. Their New York apartment is equally filled with some of their finest art purchases.

Art Needful for Home; Collector Tells Why
By Ralph Minard

Each time Mrs. Pauline D. Shulman, art collector and designer of contemporary homes, goes to Paris she makes a vow, that this the she will steel herself and buy no paintings. But each time, on the return trip, there is a Utrillo drawing or a Modigliani painting or a Toulouse Lautrec poster in her luggage.

As a consequence, her home on Mountain Avenue, Bloomfield is a veritable art gallery where she and her husband Joseph, a Hartford attorney, and their friends can enjoy the works of French moderns wherever they glance.

Mrs. Shulman was reluctant to discuss her views on art, even as in childhood she was reluctant to leave her playmates for those Sunday walks with her father, an art dealer, about East Orange, N. J., and Manhattan, clutching his hand as he taught her to look for the patterns traced by birch trees in the landscape or by wrought iron work in the city, but she admits he gave her lasting lessons. Even today she finds herself examining wrought iron fences and door decorations, sorting out the well-designed from the grotesque.

Her zeal for art is keyed to what it can do for children. She believes good paintings in a home are as necessary as food because if children learn to love art they have a mainstay for their adult life. The repetitiveness of modern life is what gets people down, in her opinion, and such an outlet as att helps carry them through low periods.

She made her first trip to Europe while she was a student at Columbia. She went again in 1936 and, except during the war, has made a yearly visit since. She always goes to Paris, sometimes to Rome, Southern France or Spain. Her husband has become extremely  interested in art and has accompanied her on her last two trips.

Paris appeals to her, largely because of the friends she has made. These include artists in two generations, art dealers and people whose lives have been lived with artists. Modigliani's daughter Jeanette is one of these. So is Paulette Jourdain, now a dealer, who was part of the Modigliani-Soutine circle. She is a friend of Le Corbusier, world-famous artist-architect and of his close friend Paul Ducret who with Mme. Ducret is arriving this week to visit the Shulmans.

Friends in Greater Hartford call her frequently to ask what they should buy while they are in Paris. This usually sets off a clinical discussion aimed at finding what they like or dislike in art. Her own taste range from cubism to impressionism but she does not expect people who have grown up with academic art to become enthusiastic purchasers of modern work.

If Mrs. Shulman has a Philosophy about collecting - and she has - it is that paintings are living parts of an artist, and should never be bought for resale. She occasionally gives a painting away, never sells one. A collector, she says, does not begin to live until he experiences "that singing feeling you have when you discover the work of some new young painter, and know it is good."

And her final credo is: buy for quality, rather than price. It is better, she says, to buy a watercolor done in an artist's great period than to yearn for the same artist's oil painting one cannot afford. And she warns against buying by name. An artist’s work should always be bought by the period when he was doing his most satisfying work, not because his name has become famous, she explains.

THE HARTFORD TIMES, April 4, 1953 (pg. 18, col. 5)               « Return to Robert Carroll May