A Delicate Courtship : Local museums pursue art collections while fighting both Eastern tradition and a reputation for indifference

Great art collectors and great museums. What a match. Collectors have art, the raison d’etre of art museums, but a commodity that few can afford to buy. Museums, on the other hand, have palaces to display the art and the means to immortalize donors as enlightened cultural patriarchs. The match is such a natural that private collections have formed most of America’s best museums, but with millionaires’ egos, scholarly reputations and big bucks at stake, it’s not surprising that many collector-museum courtships wind up on the rocks.

Pursuing collections has been especially tough in Los Angeles, where museums were born too late to compete for art that married into old families at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Southern California boasts the stellar collections of J. Paul Getty, Norton Simon and Henry E. Huntington, but local public museums have a reputation for being indifferent suitors and losing collections they might have had.

Romances with collectors bloomed here in the ‘80s with the arrival of the Museum of Contemporary Art and vigorous expansion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But now that the art market encourages collectors to cash in at auction and current income tax laws discourage donations, museums all across the country must work harder, plead more enticingly and develop new strategies to attract privately held treasures. Stung by these financial realities, leaders of Los Angeles’ public museums say they are spending more energy than ever on wooing art.

“In a sense, the whole business of museums is the cultivation of donors and the stimulation of collecting,” said Earl A. Powell, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who spends five to seven nights a week socializing on behalf of LACMA. Keeping the museum in the public eye and on collectors’ minds is essential to building a collection, he said.

Richard Koshalek, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, lunches with prospective donors three or four times a week, and he travels frequently to spread the good word about MOCA. The competition for collections has not only heated up, it has gone national, Koshalek said.

“J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery, can appear in your living room, like a genie,” said one Los Angeles collector whose patronage has been solicited from museums around the world.

“Your alma mater never forgets,” said another who has heard fervent appeals from university museums.

No hard, fast rules guide museum officials in the pursuit of art, nor is there a typical romance. One collector may walk into a director’s office and propose a quickie marriage, while another is wooed over several decades. Some donors demand a high-profile marriage, while others give the museum a peck on the cheek and fade away.

But different as their personalities may be, philanthropic collectors share one attribute: a commitment to the social good. They may be hungry--even desperate--for recognition, they may place extreme restrictions on a gift and they may flirt with a string of suitors, but if collectors did not have a strong sense of social responsibility, museums would not even get a first date, museum officials say.

“One thing all major collectors share is a desire to share their art with the general public. They want people to see what they have accomplished. These are highly motivated, very successful people who want to take a leadership role in the evolution of the cultural life of a certain city. They have a high self-confidence level. They are concerned about how they will be remembered, and that is not a negative thing,” Koshalek said.

Los Angeles art collectors who have made major gifts to museums seem to bear out this assessment.

“I grew up at a time when being patriotic was as natural as breathing. I think supporting public institutions is related to that emotional response. I’m a left wing Democrat, not a flag waver, but since the ‘60s I don’t think it has come as naturally to feel strongly committed to doing good, corny as that may sound,” said Max Palevsky, who with his wife, Jodie Evans, recently donated 32 pieces of Arts and Crafts furniture to the County Museum of Art. Their donation is on view at LACMA in “American Arts and Crafts: Virtue in Design,” an exhibition predominantly from the Palevsky collection.

Attorney Robert Gore Rifkind, who gave a collection of 5,000 German Expressionist prints and drawings to the County Museum of Art in 1983--in conjunction with the museum’s purchase of a related library of 4,500 books--traced his social commitment to his late father, Joseph Rifkind. “Dad, who was a great philanthropist, used to tell a story about a cow and a pig. The pig said, ‘Cow, I don’t understand why everyone likes you better than me. I give people bacon, ham, ribs, sausage, pigs knuckles and pickled pigs feet, but all you give is milk.’ The cow said, ‘Yes, but you’re no good to anyone until you’re dead.’ The first big thing is to decide that you are going to be a cow, but it’s very difficult to determine who’s going to get the milk,” Rifkind said.

And there’s the rub for museums. Once potential donors are identified, they must be persuaded that one museum--more than all others--deserves the milk.

Museums accomplish that feat through a complex and highly variable process that includes sweet talk, arm-twisting, scholarly guidance, public recognition and--finally--hammering out a legally binding agreement.

Tactics must be tailored to collectors’ personalities, but the most effective appeal seems to concern home and hearth. “I hear of people in California giving art to wonderful museums in the East, but I always find that puzzling. My allegiance is to where I live,” said Palevsky, who became a multimillionaire in the late ‘60s when he sold Scientific Data Systems to Xerox.

“One of the main reasons for selecting a museum is geographic. We have been involved with the County Museum of Art for 30 years, since I was a docent,” said Jo Ann Ganz, who has collected American art for 26 years with her husband, Julian Ganz, a LACMA trustee. The Ganzes, who own McMahan Furniture & Appliances, have given art to Yale University Art Gallery and earmarked a few pieces for the National Gallery, but the bulk of their collection is willed to the County Museum of Art.

Rifkind has also yielded to the home front. “For me the overriding factor was that the Rifkind family has lived in Los Angeles since the turn of the century. Los Angeles has been very good to the Rifkind family. It’s incumbent upon a potential major donor to look at more than one place. I considered other institutions that are more prestigious than the County Museum of Art, but I liked the idea of having the collection in Los Angeles,” he said.

Geographic loyalty has exerted such a strong pull that museum officials try to extend the concept to such distinguished part-time residents as Walter Annenberg, who maintains his primary residence near Philadelphia and a lavish estate in Rancho Mirage. Any hopes that Annenberg might donate his extraordinary collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings to the County Museum of Art are based on the fact that Annenberg has housed his collection in Rancho Mirage and that a traveling show of the art is at LACMA (to Nov. 11).

Some critics sniff at such a possibility, noting that Los Angeles hasn’t landed collections that actually have been offered--much less one that appears to be destined for a more prestigious East Coast museum. UCLA lost the Walter C. Arensberg collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1944 (when the university failed to provide a building for the art), for example, and the City of Beverly Hills failed to consummate a deal with Joseph H. Hirshhorn in 1964, when he considered housing his collection at the Greystone Mansion. The Hirshhorn collection went to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where it has its own building on the Capitol Mall.

Two decades later, Los Angeles collector Frederick R. Weisman offered to turn Greystone into a contemporary art museum but he backed out in 1986, after the city council threatened to sell the mansion to finance public schools and some townspeople objected to the specter of increased traffic and unruly contemporary art in their high-priced neighborhood. Weisman abandoned his search for a museum to house his entire collection and recently gave 33 works by contemporary California artists to the San Diego Museum of Art.

“Los Angeles doesn’t have a very good track record,” but the Arensberg and Hirshhorn affairs date to “a time when this was a genuinely provincial place,” Powell said. “Los Angeles is now quite attractive to collectors. It’s the second largest city in the United States, soon to be the largest, and it is central to the concept of Pacific Rim trade. If you are interested in public institutions and the public visibility and recognition that goes with that, as well as putting your collection in front of a vast and diverse audience, Los Angeles must be a place to consider,” he said.

Koshalek agreed, adding that people who live elsewhere but do business here are beginning to support Los Angeles’ cultural institutions.

The Joe D. Price collection of Japanese art is the only major out-of-town collection to come to LACMA, however, and that gift, made in 1986, was contingent upon building a Price-financed pavilion to house the art. Italian collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo’s collection of 80 Abstract Expressionist and Pop art is MOCA’s only far-flung conquest, and it was not donated but purchased for $11.5 million in 1984. (MOCA has had notable success in winning L.A.-based collections during its short history, including those of Philip and Beatrice Gersh, the late Taft and Rita Schreiber, and the late Barry Lowen.)

Geography tends to be an emotional selling point. Credentials and attributes of a particular museum are more concrete. Museum officials in pursuit of collections promote the virtues of their facilities, programs and staff to persuade collectors that their donations will be in good company, properly cared for and frequently displayed.

One thing that collectors care about is museum architecture, Koshalek said. Arata Isozaki’s critically acclaimed building on Grand Avenue and Frank Gehry’s inspired remodeling of the Temporary Contemporary have been enormous assets for MOCA, he said.

Powell believes that a construction program also attracts donors by suggesting that the museum is moving, change is possible and new collections are welcome. “The museum should never be static,” said Powell, who has overseen LACMA’s additions of the Robert O. Anderson building for modern and contemporary art and the Pavilion for Japanese Art, as well as an ongoing expansion and reordering of gallery space.

Programs also count with collectors. “Prospective donors want to be assured that a museum has a full curatorial staff, regular exhibitions and an ongoing interest in the area that they collect,” Jo Ann Ganz said.

“The main thing collectors want to know is that the art they donate won’t end up in the basement, that it will be shown and worked with in exhibitions that provoke a dialogue in the art community,” Koshalek said, citing “Constructing a History: A Focus on the Permanent Collection,” a MOCA show organized by Ann Goldstein, as a recent example.

Curators are another important museum asset, and not only for their scholarly credentials. “We typically ask curators to make want lists--naming what they want and where the pieces are located. Part of a curator’s job is to know where collections are,” Powell said. Curators sometimes function as mentors to collectors, schooling them in connoisseurship and acting as market advisers. “We’re very happy to see someone buy a work of art, just to know they made the commitment, and we hope that one day it will come to the museum,” Powell said.

Occasionally a curator nurtures a private collection from the cradle to the altar. Palevsky credits Leslie Bowman, LACMA’s curator of decorative arts, with doing exactly that. “If it hadn’t been for Leslie, this (collection) never would have happened. I had bought a few pieces I liked, but I didn’t know how to distinguish museum quality work,” he said. Powell calls Palevsky “the perfect donor” because he not only gave 32 Arts and Crafts period works to the museum, he permitted Bowman to choose what she wanted.

Wooing collectors generally calls for touting a museum’s strengths, but sometimes it pays to expose a weakness that might be fixed by the perfect gift. Los Angeles suitors often implore collectors to be generous to relatively poor local institutions instead of giving to East Coast museums that are already richly endowed with art.

“This museum is on the cusp of genuine greatness. If the Annenberg collection came here, it would have a profound impact, quite unlike what would happen if it went to the Met,” Powell said. “Were I a collector, I would consider the impact my gift would have on the institution.”

Another tactic is to solicit specific pieces or to encourage collectors to hone their collections and give only pieces that a museum really needs and will display.

“It doesn’t help to give duplicates. That’s pointless,” Jo Ann Ganz said, noting that she and her husband have carefully chosen American paintings for LACMA that will upgrade the museum’s collection and fill in gaps.

“We are going after the best objects from certain collectors,” said Julian Ganz who is soliciting promised gifts of art for LACMA’s 25th birthday exhibition of new acquisitions (Oct. 21-Jan. 6, 1991). “We’re saying to people who collect in depth, why not be represented by one wonderful thing? If they support another institution, we ask, why not have one great thing that represents your taste at the County Museum of Art?”

The Ganzes have set an example for potential donors by inviting Powell to choose one work from their collection as a gift. He selected a jewel, “Boston Sunset,” a painting by 19th-Century American artist Fitz Hugh Lane. Edward Carter--another longtime supporter who has promised his collection to the museum--has donated “The Great Oaks,” a 17th-Century Dutch landscape by Jacob van Ruisdael, in honor of the birthday celebration. These paintings will be among about 60 works in the exhibition, which is intended not only to mark a quarter-century of giving but to spark interest in future patronage.

Trustees such as Julian Ganz at LACMA, Beatrice Gersh and Lenore Greenberg (daughter of Taft and Rita Schreiber) at MOCA are particularly helpful in bringing in gifts, museum directors say. “Board members play a big role as donors and solicitors. They can say, I’ve done it and you should. That’s an appropriate role for a trustee,” Powell said.

Artists can also argue effectively for a collector to donate an example of the artist’s work to a particular museum, Koshalek said.

Dealing with changes in income tax laws remains a tough challenge, however. LACMA solicitors for the 25th birthday show are asking for promised gifts, to be made at the donor’s death. “The tax benefits of making a bequest at death haven’t changed one iota. There’s zero tax and the gift doesn’t throw you into an alternative minimum tax bracket,” Ganz said. “We’re telling people, the work will be away from your house for 90 days for the exhibition, but then you will have it until you die.”

Promised gifts are being promoted now that most collectors in high income tax brackets can only deduct the purchase price and not the appreciated value of art gifts. Partial gifts are even more desirable for museums, Koshalek said. Under this arrangement, a collector donates fractions of the value of the art over time, thus taking a higher deduction than if the art were given at one time. One advantage of partial gifts for both museums and collectors is that neither party can sell the art without the other’s permission.

“There are promised gifts, partial gifts, gift-purchases and endless permutations of the ways a collector can donate. Some people just love to negotiate and they want to explore all of them. It’s part of the ritual,” Powell said.

Museum officials cheerfully discuss all these possibilities with major collectors. What Powell calls “heavy restrictions” are generally not negotiable at major museums, however.

The most frequently cited impasse in negotiations is a demand for a separate empire within a museum. A collector may require that donated works be permanently displayed in a separate gallery, as in Frederick Weisman’s recent gift to the San Diego Museum of Art. Some collectors also want to select a personal curator who doesn’t report to the museum but who is paid by the museum. Another sticking point is a stipulation that donated works can never be sold.

The history of museum-collector relationships is full of stories about demands that have been met or denied. The two most widely criticized examples of going overboard to get a collection concern the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art. The Met built an entire wing for the Robert Lehman collection and reconstructed rooms from the late investment banker’s 54th Street mansion to re-create the way he displayed the art. The Dallas museum erected a facsimile of Emery and Wendy Reeves’ villa in Southern France to win the couple’s collection of Impressionist paintings and objets d’art .

Armand Hammer, on the other hand, pulled his collection out of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when the museum reportedly resisted his requests to hire an independent curator, remove other donors’ names from galleries containing his collection and return some paintings previously given to the museum. Hammer has publicly stated that the reason for his pull-out is that the collection had grown too large for the museum to display, but museum officials insist that they could have accommodated it. Hammer is currently building his own museum in Westwood, which is due to open in November.

Opinion on the balance of power between museums and collectors is divided, and opinions vary with the quality of a collection. “Collectors shouldn’t make museums jump through hoops. The joy of a collection is in the doing. Once you give it, you should back off and let the professionals take over,” Jo Ann Ganz said.

But Robert Rifkind said he learned to be wary of museums many years ago when he was a student at Harvard University. “I went to see the Lyonel Feininger archive at the Fogg Art Museum and found that it was not organized or catalogued. It was a mess. Twenty-five years later when I returned to the museum during a reunion, I found that nothing had changed. I couldn’t find anything, and this is not atypical.

“Museums, with notable exceptions like the Getty and to some extent the National Gallery, don’t have adequate funds and personnel to take care of major collections. I decided if I was going to give something of the magnitude of my collection, it had to be of use to scholars. It had to be properly organized and catalogued with all the vital information available. Maybe it’s my compulsive nature, but I just wanted it to be right,” Rifkind said.

The result of his conviction is a 99-page contract, negotiated with LACMA over a period of nine months. The contract spells out facility and staff requirements for the Rifkind Center for the Study of German Expressionism at the museum. The museum also agreed to catalogue the vast collection, illustrating each piece, within five years of receiving the gift. The hefty, two-volume catalogue is now complete.

Some collectors have suggested that if local museums had courted them more warmly and shown their collections, they might have donated instead of selling when the market was hot. But museum directors insist that they have to guard against “investor-collectors” who try to use museum exhibitions to increase the value of their art. Except in special cases, such as the Annenberg collection, which is packing in crowds at LACMA, major museums will not exhibit private collections unless the museum gets something in return--anything from the gift of one work to the entire collection.

“Collectors have a right to discuss everything they want. They should be firm but not make unrealistic demands,” Julian Ganz said. “To demand that an entire collection be displayed in one place can be a burden on a museum and installing entire collections intact is passe,” he said.

But what if Walter Annenberg or Norton Simon suddenly decided to donate his collection, provided the museum would accede to a rigid set of restrictions? Faced with the unlikely possibility of such a windfall, museum officials roll their eyes and start rethinking their concept of unreasonable demands.