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Last week a deal was made. Bernard Gimbel, on behalf of Ginibel Brothers, Adam Gimbel, on behalf of Saks Fifth Avenue, signed a contract to offer the bulk of Hearst's collection* to the public over the bargain counters of Manhattan's Gimbel Bros, department store and its swank subsidiary, Saks. All in all, 10-15,000 items (catalogued in 150 thick volumes) will be available after Jan. 20 at what are promised to be liquidation prices. The merchants and Dr. Armand Hammer, Manhattan art dealer, who priced the collection, will each take a cut on the sales. Said Dr. Hammer: "It will be like . . . going through a museum and finding everything there for sale with a price tag hanging from it." As a device, this sale of art to the public over store counters instead of through the regular channels is parallel to that of raising funds by selling baby bonds to the public instead of floating issues to investors. It taps a new reservoir of cash.
In the art market it has one precedent.
In 1933 Dr. Hammer used a Manhattan department store (Lord & Taylor) for disposing of a much smaller collection of Russian treasures. But whether housewives will plank down their money for medieval cannon, Colonial warming pans, or Egyptian mummies, is a merchandising unknown. They will be tempted with many a small authentic piece such as 18th-Century English pewter plates priced at $3 each. Other items: > An agate bowl mounted in gold, fine stones, brilliants and rubies, with two enameled gold sirens, bearing baskets of fruit, poised on the rim. Attributed to Cellini, it is the only original Cellini cup in the U. S. save one in the Metropolitan Museum. Price: $20,000.
> Sacramenia, famed Spanish Cistercian monastery founded by Alfonso VII of Castile, for sale, knocked down, in 14,000 crates weighing about 500 Ib. apiece—probably the finest remaining whole piece of 12th-Century Spanish architecture. Cost to Hearst: about $500,000. Cost to Gimbel's buyer: a tentative $50,000 plus cartage.
> Three French cloisters; 70 paneled rooms from English, Dutch and French castles; $7,000,000 worth of tapestries by Gobelin, Aubusson, etc.; a Van Dyck painting.
> English furniture by Cabinetmakers Sheraton, Chippendale, Hepplewhite; silver, jewelry, armor, stained glass, and a hodgepodge of valuable and semi-valuable bric-a-brac blanketing the art and decoration of most races and nations from 2500 B.C. to 1912 A.D.
Although Manhattan merchants could not say whether William Randolph Hearst's bargain basement would net him a respectable cash return, they were cer tain that the Brothers Gimbel had turned a smart merchandising trick.
New York City's rich International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union last week offered $100,000 to the city's biggest industry — its $350,000,000-a-year [wholesale] dress trade — as a starter on a $1,500,000 fund to advertise the city as the world's style centre, succeeding Paris.
* Owned by a subsidiary company named International Studio Art Corp. and tucked away in The Bronx warehouse.