For Chrysler's Sake

For many, the grandest monument bearing the Chrysler name is not a midsize four-door, but Manhattan's soaring Art Deco tower. Less well known but also remarkable is the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia. Founded by scion Walter P. Chrysler Jr., it houses 15,000 treasures once owned by this impetuous, omnivorous collector. Last fall, shortly before the completely renovated museum was about to reopen, Chrysler died, leaving a tidy portion of his collection not to his pet institution but to a nephew, Jack Chrysler, who is putting his legacy on the block. Likely candidates for feverish bidding are two paintings—Cranach's sloe-eyed Lucretia, aiming a dagger at her own sinuous body, and Ingres's Raphael and the Fornarina, an elegant fantasy of the painter trysting with his semiclad mistress. Hyping the event as the biggest old-master sale in America since 1961, Sotheby's expects the June auctions, which also include Tiffany glassware, to bring over $15 million. The unexpected terms of the will are characteristic of this collector, who had a taste for scandal as well as pictures. Sotheby's, his heir, and the museum all could find reasons to feel deprived. Described by an art-world insider as "having the soul of a junk dealer,'' Chrysler reserved for himself the pleasure of bartering his finest pictures (impeccable works by Picasso, Braque, and Cezanne) during his lifetime.

AMY FINE COLLINS