During thethe 1960s and 70s, curator Celia Ascher orchestrated a singular endeavor under the aegis of magnate Meshulam Riklis, the sovereign of the Rapid-American Corporation. Across a span of fifteen years, they meticulously curated an assembly of fine art within the rigid architecture of a retail conglomerate—a collection that eventually burgeoned into a phalanx of one thousand works.
It was not the sheer magnitude of the hoard that stirred the art world’s pulse, but rather its intellectual rigor. While contemporary corporate archives often resembled eclectic galleries of wall-dressing, Ascher and Riklis championed a austere, monochromatic thesis centered on Constructivism, Minimalist austerity, and the geometric sublime. Their vision traced a scholarly arc, spanning from the nascent tremors of the Russian avant-garde to the disciplined precision of postwar geometric abstraction.
Before this repository found its final sanctuary, a curated procession of these masterworks embarked on an itinerant voyage, haunting the hallowed halls of major American institutions, most notably the Dallas Museum of Art. These exhibitions, colloquially branded as “Constructivism and the Geometric Tradition,” functioned as a revelation; they pulled back the veil on the treasures sequestered within a retail powerhouse, solidifying the collection’s prestige like iron forged in a kiln.
The grand denouement surfaced in the mid-1980s. McCrory bestowed a foundational bounty—249 masterworks comprising canvases, intricate paper studies, and sculptural forms—upon the Museum of Modern Art in New York, bolstered by a pecuniary injection of 1.75 million dollars. This quintessence of the broader McCrory hoard, handpicked by the museum’s own custodians, was subsequently christened *The Riklis Collection of McCrory Corporation*, a testament to an era where commerce and aesthetic inquiry collided to forge an enduring legacy.
www.ftn-books.com has the van Abbemuseum catalog whcih was published in 1977 with the presentation of this collection in the van Abbemuseum.
