ART COLLECTOR BUYS WITH ALACRITY

SAN DIEGO —  More like a curator than a collector, Richard Brown Baker moved through the San Diego Museum of Art, fine-tuning its display of his choice modern artworks.

Somehow, the museum staff had missed some important details: the surreal walking stick attached to Jim Dine’s painting “Red Robe No. 2” was mispositioned; the small window shade that crowns Bruce Conner’s combine, “Spider Lady Nest,” needed to be tugged down a tad, and the length of cord that attaches to the free-standing pole of James Rosenquist’s 1963 work, “He Swallowed the Chain,” had been left dangling.

This knowing show of concern made clear that Baker is an art collector first, an art investor second. On display through Aug. 11 at the Balboa Park museum, the exhibition, “Fortissimo! Thirty Years from the Richard Brown Baker Collection of Contemporary Art,” showcases the highlights of his extensive holdings--a who’s who of modern masters and lesser knowns who’ve caught his eye and held it, regardless of their market value.

Jackson Pollock’s 1948 “Arabesque,” or Franz Kline’s 1955 “Wanamaker Block,” or Roy Lichtenstein’s 1962 “Blam” may be among the crowd-pleasing masterworks of this trove, but Baker seems to express an even greater affection for the minor--or as yet unproven--gems he has purchased. He proudly shows off the complex, cut-canvas spatial approach and cartoonish figuration of a painting by English artist Anthony Green, or the nocturnal blue mood of Jan Muller’s 1956 “Hamlet and Horatio.”

“One of my great good fortunes is to respond with alacrity to works of art, and not to change my mind often, so I don’t agonize over works,” he said in his clipped New England tones. “There are a lot of decisions in life that I postpone making, but visually I am able to make decisions quickly.” Baker is also quick to point out that he doesn’t consider himself wealthy, that many of his purchases have been matters of buying on credit and eking out the payments, that he has rarely bought works on auction and never sells his works.

“I buy works soon after the artist has created them,” he said. “This very small work by Louise Nevelson, for example (a wood piece titled ‘Boxed Being’), is one of the earliest things she sold, back in the 1950s. It was actually one unit of a larger work, but I got the dealer to part with it. It was like buying one chocolate out of a whole box that the confectioner had hoped to sell.”

Baker’s purchase of Pollock’s “Arabesque” in 1955 for $2,500 established him on the New York art scene. The work is one of the few prime drip-period Pollock’s still in private hands. At the time, Brown had recently sold a weekend log cabin in Northern Virginia and was ready to make a purchase, although Pollock wasn’t his first choice.

“I thought I’d rather acquire a major de Kooning than a Pollock,” recalled Baker of that day in New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery when he first saw “Arabesque,” which was clearly a bargain at the time, its value vaulting upon Pollock’s death a year later.

“I liked it the moment I saw it,” Baker said. “Although at the time it seemed that de Kooning was a rising star, and Pollock, who drank a great deal, had already given up his drip period. His works were less popular, he was moving off-center. But I loved this work.

“I had a tendency to prefer linear things, you see, than the works of, say, Mark Rothko, which I’ve now come to realize I really do like. But I wasn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate them in his day. I believe I was shown one Rothko that was only at $750, and of course I regret that I didn’t buy it, but I think I made the right decision, because as long as I didn’t like a painting, it wasn’t a very sensible thing to buy.”

Born in Providence, R.I., Baker said his early exposure to art stemmed from childhood travels through Europe, and that his passion for modern art probably stemmed from his dislike of Victoriana. He graduated from Yale University in 1935 with a degree in English literature. As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, he studied political affairs.

In 1940, he became an attache to the U.S. ambassador to Spain and served during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services and the State Department. By 1948, he had retired and moved to Manhattan, where he began collecting and where he still lives in a Park Avenue apartment.

Brown noted that one of his most recent acquisitions is a sugarlift etching by Robert Motherwell. Is he at all drawn to the young Neo-Expressionist painters who currently rule the New York gallery scene?

“I suppose (Neo-Expressionism) interests me more and more,” he said. “I’ve seen a number of works by Anselm Kiefer in Europe that I like very much, but they’re so big! I really don’t know, though. I simply don’t feel a spontaneous enthusiasm for the Neo-Expressionists, and the works I buy I feel an almost immediate response to and enthusiasm for.”

For Baker, obviously, a work’s size and and its artist’s reputation are weighed against the collector’s purely personal response. He takes as much satisfaction in the small Kurt Schwitters collage (“Poco Poco”) he bought for $250 at the callow start of his collecting days as in the great prestige pieces. And there are countless minor but beloved works by major names such as Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg.

“Sure, I’m influenced by the reputation that an artist has built up,” Baker said. “But even the paintings I’ve bought that sit in a warehouse, by artists already forgotten--I’m still loyal to them visually, even though I can’t see enough of the works all the time. I don’t have a residence large enough!”