In the 1950s and '60s, successive curators and prominent St. Louis collectors continued to build on that curatorial architecture, creating one of the nation's finest university collections of modern art.

Beginning March 12, the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries in New York will revisit those years with H.W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis. The exhibition is organized by Sabine M. Eckmann, Ph.D., curator of the Gallery of Art, and includes 21 masterworks by Max Beckmann, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Theo van Doesburg, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Arshile Gorky, Juan Gris, Marsden Hartley, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Yves Tanguy.

Max Ernst's visionary landscape The Eye of Silence (1943-44) conjures both a haunted, war-ravaged Europe and a fantastical, primeval American West. Works by Ernst are part of the exhibition H.W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis, which runs March 12-April 6 at the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries in New York.

The accompanying catalog, published by the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries and the Washington University Gallery of Art (New York/St. Louis), features Eckmann's essay "Exilic Vision," a consideration of Janson's emigration from Germany, of his connections with prominent New York-based exile dealers and of the influence both would exert on his views about contemporary art.

The book also reproduces a previously unpublished lecture from 1981, in which Janson recalls his years at Washington University and building the modern collection.

"Janson was the instrumental force in selecting and acquiring modern art for the University," Eckmann said. "Having arrived in the U.S. in 1935 as an exile from Hitler's Germany, he rejected the National Socialists' nationalistic interpretation and propagation of German art and was committed to cosmopolitanism."

Mark S. Weil, Ph.D., the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts and director of the Gallery of Art, said, "Janson's acquisitions, as well as the presence of subsequent, nationally known directors, stimulated a new generation of civic leaders to donate important works by major contemporary artists." The result, Weil added, are particularly strong cubist, constructivist and surrealist holdings, as well as a substantial representation of early and mid-20th-century American artists.

Born in 1913 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Janson was raised in Hamburg, Germany, where his family settled after fleeing the October Revolution of 1917. He began his university education in Munich in 1932 but transferred the following year to Hamburg University, studying with Erwin Panofsky until the influential professor's firing by National Socialists. (Fellow students included distinguished art historians Lise Lotte Müller, William S. Heckscher and Lotte Brand Philip.)

"Janson's perceptions of modern art were clearly formed against the backdrop of the anti-modernist, racist and defamatory cultural politics of National Socialist Germany," Eckmann said. Though himself gentile, Janson left Germany both out of solidarity with his Jewish teachers and to protest Nazi policies, even going so far as to change his name from Horst to Peter, after "The Horst Wessel Song" became an anthem of the Third Reich.

He arrived at Washington University as an assistant professor of art history in 1941, a time when public awareness of the University collection was almost nonexistent. Though established in 1881, the collection lacked on-campus facilities and was held in storage at the City Art Museum (CAM; now the Saint Louis Art Museum). Janson only discovered the collection, then mostly 19th-century American and European paintings and applied arts, through a close reading of CAM's wall labels.

Janson was named curator in 1944 and, granted a makeshift gallery in Givens Hall, immediately began organizing shows, often providing security by working at a desk he'd brought into the room. However, his boldest stroke came in 1945, when he guided the Art Collections Committee through the de-accessioning of 120 paintings and more than 500 additional objects -- then almost a sixth of total holdings.

The sale raised approximately $40,000, with some $23,000 brought by Frederic Remington's Dash For Timber -- a price, Janson later remembered, so high as to meet with disapproval from Time magazine.

Over the next year, Janson used those monies to purchase some 40 modernist paintings, sculptures and prints. Highlights -- all in the Salander-O'Reilly exhibition -- include Picasso's early collage Glass and Bottle of Suze (1912); Gris' Still Life With Playing Cards (1916); Braque's Still Life With Glass (1930); and Beckmann's Four Men Around a Table (1943-44), the last an allegorical depiction of the artist and three friends who've fled the Nazis for Amsterdam. American modernists are represented by the organic surrealism of Calder's Bayonets Menacing a Flower (1945).

"The scope of Janson's undertaking was unusual, considering that the most progressive American museums had only begun collecting modern work in the late 1920s and 1930s," Eckmann said. "In light of the strong anti-modernist trends then dominating the American art world -- including university museums -- one could even call it bold."

Significantly, many of the dealers with whom Janson worked were themselves European exiles. These include Paul Rosenberg -- whose apartment and gallery were located in the same Manhattan building now home to Salander-O'Reilly -- Karl Nieiendorf, Julien Levy, Pierre Matisse (son of Henri) and especially Curt Valentin.

Janson left campus in 1948 but subsequent curators like Frederick Hartt and William N. Eisendrath Jr. continued to work with local collectors -- including Joseph Pulitzer Jr., Morton D. May, Etta Steinberg, Sidney M. Shoenberg and Mr. and Mrs. Richard K. Weil -- to round out Janson's early modern, cubist and expressionist projects.

Highlights from this period include Matisse's Still Life With Oranges (1899); Lipchitz's Pierrot With Clarinet (1919); and Picasso's Women of Algiers, Variation 'N' (1955). Meanwhile, Hartley's The Iron Cross (1915) and Davis' Max No. 2 (1949) strengthened holdings in early American modernism, while newer movements were represented by Pollock's Sleeping Effort (1953) and de Kooning's Saturday Night (1956).

H.W. Janson runs March 12-April 6. Salander-O'Reilly is located at 20 E. 79th St. Hours are 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday.