Class Notes: September 13, 1995


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Class Notes Features

  • Leonard Milberg '53 Loves Prints and Princeton

  • Sobieraj Gets Flowers for Facts (Sandra Sobieraj '89)


    LEONARD MILBERG '53 LOVES PRINTS AND PRINCETON
    If you want to start collecting art, buy what you like, and then you won't have to worry about its value as an investment. You'll always have something you like.
    This advice comes from one of Princeton's great collectors, Leonard L. Milberg '53.
    He is puzzled by a man he knows who collects works by Andy Warhol. "I never bought anything because somebody said to buy it. I have American prints that are extremely rare," Milberg says, waving a hand at one of the many prints on the walls of his office at Milberg Factors, in Manhattan.
    "That French print of 'Nouvel Amsterdam' in 1672 is not New Amsterdam at all, it's really Lisbon. The buildings labeled Maison de Ville and Stock Exchange are in Lisbon. There are only five impressions known to exist, and mine is the only one in color. It cost less than an Andy Warhol print of soup cans and there are thousands of those."
    Milberg has given Princeton a third of his prints, mostly folio views of cities and towns in this country, and many of them adorn the walls of Firestone Library. "He has really created two collections," says Dale Roylance, the library's recently retired curator of graphic arts. "One is private, and the other has been for Princeton."
    When it comes to art and literature, his chosen fields for collecting, Milberg says he is an autodidact. He took no art courses while at Princeton, where he majored in history, but in 1954, while on duty with the Army in Alaska, he began reading art books.
    Later, exposure to a collection of American prints at the New York Public Library whetted his interest in graphic arts. On a visit to Princeton in 1980, he saw an exhibit of American prints in Firestone and called on Roylance.
    "Dale knows as much about printing as anybody I've ever known," he says. "He's a kindred spirit. I've learned a lot from him." In turn, Roylance regards Milberg as the ideal benefactor: interested and full of ideas, and a man whose generosity includes a willingness to pay for catalogues for the exhibits he funds.
    In addition to giving a gallery for the graphic arts room in Firestone, Milberg has funded many exhibitions over the years, including "Pride of Place," a show of early American views that was put together in celebration of his 30th reunion, in 1983.
    Two years ago, for his 40th reunion, the Art Museum at his suggestion exhibited works collected by his classmates. Thomas Hoving '53, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, served as curator.
    Milberg also conceived and funded a 1994 Firestone exhibit of books, pamphlets, letters, greeting cards, and other items related to 70 modern poets. He dedicated the exhibit to another of his mentors, Richard M. Ludwig, an emeritus professor of English and retired curator of rare books.
    "I feel comfortable about my knowledge of American painting, but not poetry," says Milberg, although he has been reading verse seriously since the 1960s. "Poetry is difficult, challenging, uncomfortable. "
    He finds contemporary poetry especially difficult, but also exhilarating. At the top of his pantheon of modern poets are Richard Wilbur, Adrienne Rich, and (perhaps chauvinistically) two Princetonians, Galway Kinnell '48 and W. S. Merwin '48.
    With perhaps the single exception of Anne Sexton, he says, the best modern poets "are very, very well educated. You read their poems on various levels. You have to understand the form they're using, and catch the allusions to poets dead and alive, to mythology, the classics, and the inside jokes. When I run into trouble, I call Dick Ludwig, and he usually says, 'Read the poem again.' "
    A. Walton Litz '51, the Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres, Emeritus, has called his attention to contemporary Irish poets. "Paul Muldoon is engaging," says Milberg, referring to the Irish poet who heads Princeton's creative writing program, "and so many others are in the United States now: Derek Mahon at the City University of New York, Seamus Heaney at Harvard, Thomas Kinsella at Temple."
    Milberg admires the late critic and journalist Edmund Wilson '16, whose books he also collects. "He had no sense of limiting himself. When he was dying, he was reading all of Scott. He learned Hebrew to read the Dead Sea Scrolls. I want to be that way," says Milberg.
    He seems well on his way. Milberg subscribes to 30 magazines and is usually reading three or four books at any given time. In March of this year, they included Muldoon's Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, Donald Kagan's The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, and Out of Egypt, a memoir by André Aciman, an assistant professor of Romance languages (Notebook, June 7).
    In the visual arts, Milberg lately has been focusing his collecting energies on volumes of English color plates. "He now has one of the finest representations of color aquatint books in private hands," says Roylance.
    Milberg promises, "We're going to have a show of them soon at Princeton."
    -Ann Waldron
    SOBIERAJ GETS FLOWERS FOR FACTS
    Sandra Sobieraj '89, a staffer for the Associated Press and a Princeton class secretary, holds a four-foot-tall flower arrangement sent to her by a grateful Sharon Stone (bottom). Sobieraj correctly reported actress Stone's speech on cancer to the National Press Club in June. She was the only reporter who understood Stone was not announcing she was in remission from "lymph cancer," but rather was saying doctors had misdiagnosed her.
    Sobieraj said, "They only could have been from one of two people, and I was grateful they weren't from the guy in a Speedo I met at the beach over the weekend. Clearly she thinks I have a grand foyer instead of a 200-square-foot studio apartment."
    The account of Stone's gift and Sobieraj's quotes appeared in the Washington Post, the Washingtonian magazine, and Newsweek. Two months later she adds, "Still no offers from prospective Speedo-less dates or generous landlords! Either way, I've enjoyed my extended 15 minutes of fame."


paw@princeton.edu