The Rifkind Touch

What does a prominent patron of the arts wear when visitors come to see his world-class collection in his Beverly Hills home? Whatever he wants.

On a warm Indian summer day, Robert Gore Rifkind, a 73-year-old retired lawyer who has acquired one of the most extensive and important collections of German Expressionist art in the world, conducts a private tour wearing a royal blue knit polo shirt, loose black shorts, tall tube socks and plastic sandals. He pauses in front of “The Last Judgment” by Walter Jacob, a large oil on canvas that shows a man dragging a woman to her execution by her hair. Any chance Rifkind’s very casual costume had of surprising his guests is superseded by the shock the painting delivers.

“This art isn’t intended to relax you,” Rifkind explains, bluntly stating the obvious.

The fact that much of German Expressionism is so intense and disturbing is precisely what draws Rifkind to it. The movement began in 1906 with five young artists who rebelled against the bourgeois art dominant in late 19th century Germany. Their goal was to change society as well as the prevailing artistic styles. In the next 30 years, their numbers swelled and their work became some of the most powerful social criticism in modern art history. Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner are among the best known of the movement; all of them are well represented in Rifkind’s collection.

When he began buying German Expressionism 30 years ago, the work was not in great demand. He cut an unrivaled swath through the art market, which had other darlings on its mind. Rifkind behaves like a man accustomed to getting his own way, so outbidding German museums--among others--was particularly gratifying.

Inherited and earned wealth and his stature as a collector and major museum donor have given Rifkind license to write his own scripts and command applause. When he introduces his secretary of 19 years as “the new girl,” she smiles weakly, as if she hasn’t heard the line many, many times. He tells a new acquaintance the tale of how his 94-year-old bachelor uncle died in bed with two 35-year-old women, without any awareness that not everyone would find the story as amusing as he.

Rifkind receives several requests a month from people eager to see the paintings and sculptures that fill his temperature-controlled, heavily secured house in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. Prim antique furniture, formal fabrics and muted colors give the rooms an Old World feel. With art everywhere--from the foyer, whose walls are covered with German Expressionist posters, to the master bedroom--the house looks as if it could belong to a prosperous Berliner.

Unhindered by the crowds that often flock to public exhibitions, art lovers visiting Rifkind’s home can stand close enough to a painting to see the anguish in a man’s eyes. Although a striking landscape by the German Expressionist Eric Heckle hangs in the library, most of the art is figurative, and torment is everywhere.

It’s in the ravaged biblical hero’s face in “The Legend of Samson” by Max Oppenheimer, in the body language of hulking sculptures of heavily burdened peasants by Kthe Kollwitz and Ernst Barlach. If the artists haven’t depicted their subjects in the midst of a yowling scream, it’s easy to look at most of the works and imagine one is about to be unleashed.

Artists’ Work Spoke to Him

How can you live with this art?, Rifkind admits he is often asked. “I love to be stimulated,” he replies. To Rifkind, the voices of revolutionary artists creating in a turbulent era spoke louder than the abundance and natural beauty he was surrounded by, growing up privileged in Beverly Hills. His paternal grandfather moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1890 and established a chain of pharmacies that became Thrifty Drugstores. (The family no longer holds an interest in the company, now known as Rite-Aid.) Joseph Rifkind, his father, was a lawyer and later a federal bankruptcy court judge.

The art Rifkind was exposed to as a young man was more decorative than the style that later became his passion. “Like almost everyone in my generation, I was brainwashed into thinking if art was French, it was good,” he says. “When I graduated from Harvard Law School in the ‘50s, I began to collect what everyone else did--Chagall, Matisse, Durand, Dufy, Picasso. I was drawn to Renaissance art, which my parents loved and had a few pieces of, but I knew it would be difficult for me to amass a major collection of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rafael.”

Although he typically worked 61/2 days a week, because Rifkind decided he wanted collecting and living with art to be part of his lifestyle he found time to devote to his avocation. He also married three times and fathered three sons. The eldest died, 36-year-old Josh is an actor who had a recurring role in “Beverly Hills 90210” and 12-year-old Max, he says, has replaced German Expressionist art as the love of his life. A varsity swimmer at UCLA, Rifkind still swims, hikes on paths surrounding the Griffith Observatory and on the beach near his house in Marina del Rey. He regularly attends performances of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has a season box at the Hollywood Bowl and is a sponsor of the Beverly Hills Symphony Orchestra. No longer actively collecting, he says he spends most of his time on his son, who’s on his school swim team, and his “lady friends.”

For a competitive man who speaks in superlatives (“I have the largest German Expressionist sculpture collection in the world,” he says), building just another art collection would have been out of character. Rifkind headed “the largest securities law practice in Los Angeles,” with 55 lawyers toiling in downtown and Beverly Hills offices, and branches in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. When he discovered German Expressionism in 1969, it was still available and relatively inexpensive, circumstances that allowed a serious collector to vault to the head of the class, acquiring a large number of works of the best quality. “I didn’t collect it because of the price,” he says. “I wanted it because of the emotional impact it had on me.”

Peter Selz, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of the history of art and author of “German Expressionist Painting,” the 1957 book that is still the definitive work on the genre, admires the collection. “It would be almost impossible to put together a collection like Robert Rifkind’s today. He has acquired as comprehensive a collection of German Expressionist graphics as you can find in this country.”

The movement first caught Rifkind’s attention in European museums. “I was awed by the vigor, the power and intensity of it,” he says. “For 21/2 years, I read everything I could get my hands on about German Expressionism. I was so consumed by it that I’d go to Mazatlan, where there are no telephones, and sit on the beach for four or five days straight, reading art books. After studying for two years, I felt knowledgeable enough to collect.”

He persuaded Los Angeles art dealer Orrel P. Reed Jr. to close his gallery and come to work as his curator. For the next 15 years, they purchased six to eight works a day, from auctions, galleries and private sellers and soon enlisted the help of an assistant curator and an art librarian. The art Rifkind lives with is a small portion of the collection, which also includes over 6,000 works on paper--posters, lithographs, etchings, woodcuts and silk-screens.

In 1983, most of those were donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where they’re housed in the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies.

“It’s extremely unusual for a private collector to comprehend how critical maintaining a library of original source material is to understanding a movement,” says Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern and contemporary art and vice president of education and public programs at LACMA. Barron, who has curated major exhibitions at LACMA related to German Expressionism, was Rifkind’s third wife, from 1983 until their divorce in 1997, and is the mother of Max.

“German scholars like to come to the Rifkind center to do research, because they can have access to rare periodicals and original documents that they’d have to try to find in state libraries all over Germany.”

Collector Trusts His Own Eye

As Rifkind became increasingly knowledgeable in the field, he began acquiring what he considered exciting works by lesser-known artists.

“My goal had been to build a broad-spectrum collection,” he says. “There isn’t a well-known artist I wanted to own that I don’t have, but I wanted some who weren’t famous as well.”

That meant he trusted his own eye to choose works he considered worthwhile.

Throughout the collection are fiercely carved woodcuts and portraits saturated with strong, almost violent colors, uncompromising images of despair and defiance. A Beckmann sculpture of Adam and Eve that he donated to LACMA is on display in one of the museum’s galleries of 20th century art. Adam is large and commanding. A tiny Eve rests on him, her body the size of one of his ribs. Rifkind delights in the unconventional portrait of the couple, chuckling at the artist’s juxtaposition of the figures.

Considering Rifkind’s contrarian streak, perhaps abrasive art isn’t such an odd obsession. Tell the collector you’re allergic to lemon, and he’ll complain that not enough lemon was brought to the table for your ice tea. Rather than say he’s rich beyond even a gold digger’s wildest dreams, he mock-complains that he’s the pauper on his Beverly Hills block, compared to neighbors Marvin Davis and the sultan of Brunei. His explanation for why so many of his works are kept in storage is “I’m a very poor man, and I can’t afford a house big enough for my collection.” It’s a chicken-and-egg question: Did Rifkind enjoy being outrageous before collecting German Expressionism, or have three decades of living with it affected him?

Thirty years of buying art the way a “Sex and the City” heroine scarfs up new shoes has brought financial rewards. A German Expressionist painting he bought for $280,000 in the ‘70s sold a few years ago for $5 million. Another purchased for $115,000 sold for nearly $8 million 25 years later. “My broker said there’s no stock I could have bought that would have had the return I’ve gotten on some of my art. But I never bought art as an investment,” Rifkind says. “Los Angeles has been very good to the Rifkind family, so now I want to give something back. My art gives me the opportunity to do that.”