His own private Wolfsonian: the collector Mitchell Wolfson Jr. has given a pair of New York pieds-a-terre the aura of wonder and surprise that distinguish his decorative arts museums in Miami and Genoa.

One supreme irony in the history of museums in the United States is that our grand national collection, the Smithsonian Institution, was endowed by a man (James Smithson) who had no interest in art collecting. But two more recent decorative arts museums--the Wolfsonian in Miami Beach (established in 1986; see Fig. 6) and the Wolfsoniana in Genoa, (opened in 1993)--bear the indelible imprint of an eponymous founder besotted with objects.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

For more than half a century now, Mitchell Wolfson Jr. has been amassing underappreciated and offbeat modernist design--everything from an aesthetic movement sideboard (1867) by Edward William Godwin (1833-1886) to a 1928 German toy zeppelin to a futuristic head of Benito Mussolini by Renato Bertelli (1900-1974). Presenting them among thousands of other discoveries to the public on two continents, he has won critical respect and popular approval for innumberable neglected works, high and low, that had long been disdained by status-seeking connoisseurs and conformist curators.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Wolfson's multiple roles as philanthropic innovator, cultural archaeologist, revisionist tastemaker, and market bellwether are united by his conviction that the decorative arts must be seen in human terms, not as theoretical abstractions. For this inveterate raconteur, every object tells a story--sometimes several stories--and his animated narratives about inanimate objects can be as beguiling as the bedtime tales of Scheherazade.

Mitchell Wolfson Jr. (Micky to his friends) was born in 1939 in Miami, where his father founded a large chain of movie theaters and enjoyed a second career as the resort town's mayor. It remains the principal domicile of Wolfson Jr., whose languid accent and courtly manners bespeak a gentler epoch before South Beach bacchanalia and Art Basel/Miami Beach.