Walter Annenberg Surveys the Land : In art as in politics, the collector and former diplomat knows what he likes

Walter Annenberg looks a little hemmed in, ensconced in one of the otherwise-sumptuous pink celebrity bungalows behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. It must strike him as cramped compared to Sunnylands, his 250-acre winter estate near Palm Springs.

America’s Nixon-era ambassador to Great Britain is in town for festivities around the opening of his collection of 54 French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings at the County Museum of Art on Thursday. It includes such signature masterworks as Van Gogh’s “La Berceuse” and Paul Gauguin’s “The Siesta,” the last prime Tahitian-period picture left in private hands.

The show comes to Los Angeles after appearing at his hometown Philadelphia Museum of Art and Washington’s National Gallery, where it drew critical raves as probably the finest collection of its kind in private hands. It also ignited endless speculation as to which museum--if any--Annenberg might eventually give the collection. All of the museums on the tour have been mentioned as possible candidates, including LACMA. But Annenberg won’t name names, only discussing possible terms.

“I have a personal desire to see the paintings stay together,” he said. “In the last six months, I’ve twice been offered immense sums to sell the whole collection. My response was, ‘You are asking me to sell members of my family.’ ”

He has long since given up the old idea of turning his Xanadu-like estate into a museum. Asked his view of so-called “boutique” museums devoted to one-person collections such as Chicago’s Terra Museum and Armand Hammer’s controversial museum-in-progress in Westwood, he snorts, “Let’s not get into all that or I’ll wind up sued for libel. I’ve seen things done around such museums that are outrageous and disappointing.”

Elsewhere he has tagged the Terra collection “zilch,” and stated he would not hang a single picture from the Hammer collection.

Annenberg is cordial to an interviewer but warns his time is limited. He is meeting his friend, Ronald Reagan, to play golf after lunch. At 82, he appears comfortably portly, relaxed and fit, nattily clad in tan slacks and a white polo shirt. His profile would look perfectly apt on the portrait bust of an ancient Roman senator. Nestled in the corner of a rather florid settee, he is avuncular and loquacious, betraying only the faintest hint of the stutter that plagued his youth. He speaks in the suave accents of the boardroom, gracious and restrained. And why not?

Familiar of kings, princes and Presidents, the conservative Republican entertains lavishly. Philanthropist, bird watcher and recipient of the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, the former publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer sold his Triangle Publications (TV Guide, Seventeen, The Daily Racing Form) to Rupert Murdoch in 1988 for $3 billion.

No wonder he treats the financial value of his collection only as a matter of conversational amusement. In 1974, when he bought his Van Gogh, “Vase of Flowers,” it cost $7.5 million. In 1987 the tragic Dutchman’s “Irises” fetched $53.9 million at auction.

Despite some weakness in last fall’s auctions, he says, “there is no threat to the price structure for pictures of quality. Every sizable community now wants an art museum. It’s just simple economics. Demand will continue to outrun supply--only increasing prices.”

“Will somebody answer that thing?” he bellows, irritably, as the phone rings. It’s one of Los Angeles’ better-known movers and shakers. Annenberg smoothly begs off an earlier appointment to tour the Getty Museum.

“I love and admire (Getty director) John Walsh,” he intones. “The Getty is a tremendous museum . . . but I have seen most of the new things out there and I am glued to my seat here watching CNN. I’m expecting drastic news. Iraq is a colossal story. There are terrible risks involved in that situation but also opportunities. People want life to be all peaches and cream but that’s not the way of the world. You know what I always say? ‘Harassment is just around the corner.’ That’s original.”

Speaking of harassment and current events provides Annenberg with an opportunity to address the endless controversy around the National Endowment for the Arts.

“In exhibiting art you have a right to consider dignity and wholesomeness,” he says. “Yet in a constitutional democracy people do as they please within the law. Art is a very personal expression and there one cannot sit in judgment on another person simply because they do not like what he does.”

However, Annenberg is known to find such controversial works as Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” “egotistical and disgusting.”

When a photographer arrives to take his picture, Annenberg--accustomed to having his way-- charms his way into control.

“Just go ahead with what you’re doing, young lady,” he remarks. “I always say, ‘Never impede a working person.’ Wait. I can’t have my picture taken in shirtsleeves.”

His houseman brings a jacket.

“Can you just take a quick picture?” he asks.

“Shall I shoot while you are talking?”

“No. That way you’ll get one with my mouth open and some liberal left-wing editor will use that one to embarrass me.”

She moves to his right.

“I don’t like my picture taken from that side.”

He turns revealing an ear that was deformed at birth.

“This is just the light. I shoot from the other side.”

As the photographer goes about her business, Annenberg continues.

“I have always loved beauty, so I was not surprised when I was attracted to art,” he says. “I had seven sisters, several of whom where interested in art. One painted but never exhibited because she was never satisfied with her work and destroyed her canvases. My sister Enid had a superb eye and was a great collector.” (He bought a Vuillard painting depicting seven women because it reminded him of his sisters.)

Annenberg started collecting seriously in the ‘50s, then elevated his holdings into major status when he acquired 15 pictures from his sister Enid Haupt, the noted gardener, philanthropist and former editor of Triangle’s Seventeen magazine.

His criteria as a collector are a curious combination of refinement and the most basic sort of man-in-the-street values.

“I love a work of art that appeals to me on sight. It has to move me. Taste changes, and I found increasingly I am attracted to a work that tells something of a story. Picasso’s ‘Au Lapin Agile,’ which I bought at auction last year (for $40.7 million), for example, was painted after his best friend--a Spaniard--killed himself over a tragic love affair. The painting reflects the mood of a man who would kill himself, and the girl standing by is the real girl in the incident. He first tried to shoot her but she was only wounded, then he turned the gun on himself. Naturally, Picasso despised her. She was a model and a laundress. But years later when she was old and sick, he visited her, laid a bundle of francs on her table and said, ‘Now I forgive you.’

To illustrate his evolving taste, he tells the story of being offered two paintings, Picasso’s “Woman with a Mandolin” and Georges Braque’s “The Studio.” He bought the Picasso, but after a number of years found “a bare-breasted woman holding a mandolin rather insipid,” and sold it. Recently he bought the regretted Braque, which is a late entry to the LACMA exhibition.

The Picasso now hangs in the Norton Simon museum.

“I don’t mean that as a criticism of Simon, of course,” he says grinning. “It’s all a matter of taste.

“Collectors have an ethical obligation to the general public. Philosophically, I’ve come more and more to the conclusion that great works of art should ultimately belong to the people. I’ve had some experience of that. When I published the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Barnes Foundation was closed to the public.”

The reference is to the collection of Albert Barnes, a brilliant, cantankerous Philadelphia collector who, during the 1930s, amassed one of the most admired collections of pioneer modern art in America, but kept it out of the public eye.

“I editorialized against that,” Annenberg recounts. “After nine years I got the foundation open to the public three days a week.”

He remains somewhat sympathetic to the current dilemma of museums, whose ability to acquire new works has been severely curtailed by tax laws that discourage donations and by rising prices that exclude all but the wealthiest from buying works outright.

“Congress made a mistake in denying people the full value of donated paintings. The public should support legislation that favors their museums. On the other hand, we may be in a period when holders of art don’t have much standing. There are so many problems in the world (that wealthy collectors) may not hold very high priority. That’s unfortunate but you have to be a realist. I’m not too sympathetic; I’d never sell an artwork unless I became destitute.”

That does not seem imminent, he agrees, chuckling. “I’m sorry for the museums but, in fact, they have not been seriously impaired, although they must assume the posture of being deprived.”

The word deprived sounds odd from the mouth of a man who lives in privilege and luxury on a fortune made from businesses inherited from his father. But Annenberg’s charmed life has in fact been punctuated with tragedy, criticism and controversy.

His ambassadorial appointment was roundly drubbed as a political payoff to an unqualified crony. His handling of the Inquirer was scorned as manipulative and self-serving. Shortly after his first wife divorced him, his son, a schizophrenic, committed suicide.

Earliest and worst, his tough, German-Jewish immigrant father, Morris Louis Annenberg, was indicted for tax evasion and bribery. He had realized the American dream from ground zero, struggling up through the unsavory Chicago newspaper wars until he purchased the Inquirer in 1936. The indictment came in 1939. Annenberg pere immediately pleaded guilty to avoid the threatened implication of his son. He was released from prison in 1944, after serving three years. A month after his release he was dead.

“It was a personal tragedy,” says Annenberg. “It was totally political. My father editorialized rather powerfully against the New Deal, and Roosevelt set out to make a case against him.” He declines to discuss it further. It’s not about art.

But art is not free of politics, as Annenberg well knows. In 1975, as a board member of the Metropolitan Museum, he joined forces with then-director Thomas Hoving to install a communications center at the museum as a branch of the Annenberg School for Communications, which operates under the joint trusteeship of the University of Pennsylvania and USC. The idea, partly inspired by Sir Kenneth Clark’s television series, “Civilization,” was to use media to bring great art to the masses.

“I had a tremendous desire to make art available to people, but the idea was attacked by the politicians. I withdrew the offer. Why put up with such abuse from political figures?”

Friction aside, Annenberg is an admirer of the Met, regarding it, along with the Louvre, as one of the world’s two greatest museums. He is also thumpingly American, and known to believe that “strength goes to strength.”

One is thus inclined to guess that the American museum that annually attracts more than 4 million visitors might be the front-runner to one day receive the collection of a man interested in bringing art to the people.

* LASTING IMPRESSIONS: Why are the Impressionists so enduringly popular? See Christopher Knight’s commentary, Page 100.