Art Collections And Collectors

SOMEWHERE between a dorm-room poster of Monet's waterlilies and the Robert Rauschenberg painting owned by Eli Broad is another level -- the beginnings of an art collection that can be built by anyone with a few grand to spend.

In Santa Paula, art has always been everywhere and nowhere. For seven decades, the agricultural town's civic art collection has been scattered through municipal offices and public buildings, but not assembled in any one spot. People being rushed to emergency appendectomies at Santa Paula Hospital might get a glimpse of some California Impressionists in the hallways. High school students could eyeball landscapes as they chowed down in the cafeteria. Now, as some cultural institutions cut their hours or even shut their doors, a hometown group has opened a museum to display paintings that have become a source of local pride.

Mark McCloud is one of the premier stamp collectors in the United States. Sometimes he finds the activity to be gut-wrenching, mind expanding and a downright trip. "Sometimes," says the 40-year-old artist, "you break into your stamp collection and eat 'em. That's the tricky thing with this currency. It's redeemed by eating. And as you spend it you get richer, not poorer." You see, McCloud's little stamps are laced with LSD.

The owner of a multimillion-dollar collection of artwork stolen last month has unexpectedly waived the insurance policy he owns to protect the paintings, Los Angeles police detectives confirmed Thursday. The art world was abuzz in early September with word that a series of original works by famed Pop Art icon Andy Warhol had been stolen from the walls of noted art collector Richard L. Weisman's Westside Los Angeles home. In all, 11 brightly colored silk screen paintings were gone -- 10 are portraits of famous athletes and one is of Weisman, 69, who was friends with Warhol and commissioned the series in the late 1970s.

Cliff and Mandy Einstein are the kind of couple you can't imagine apart. They finish each other's sentences. They savor the same coffees and wines. They treat each other with great affection and yet are quick to quibble over a forgotten fact in the stories they love to tell. Married 42 years, they're the definition of how a relationship can grow within the aura of stability.

GREETING guests on his penthouse rooftop, Eugenio Lopez Alonso seems to have all the requisite props for his jet-set playboy lifestyle. Swingin' bachelor pad crammed with expensive artworks? Check. Second home in Beverly Hills, done up in chic, high-Modernist style? Check. Two yippy dogs, named Jasper (as in Johns) and Pollock (as in Jackson)? Yup. Posse of glamorous, attractive pals hanging out nearby? Check. Private source of steady income? Um, you're kidding, right?

He seems like just the kind of guy you'd expect to be a success in the television industry. Brusque-yet-polished New York manners, semi-casual dress, dry wit and enough self-deprecation to let you know right away there's a lot more intellect beyond the first impression. Dean Valentine, in other words, isn't immediately surprising when he greets you with a friendly smile.

Something must have gone awry with the instructions. There can't possibly be a residence here on this Venice street, at least not a three-story concrete contemporary, and brand new to boot. Surely there are restrictions: This is smack in the heart of an old Venice retail and restaurant district, several carefree blocks of mostly low-slung, charm-galore stucco and brick structures. But here's the address, all right, just past a hippie throwback shop in a tiny clapboard bungalow.

Heavy cost overruns may have caused Occidental Petroleum officials last summer to use accounting devices to switch millions of dollars from the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center books to other corporate categories. In order to settle a shareholder suit over financing of the center, Occidental had earlier agreed to hold costs for the Westwood facility to $60 million or less. To meet the goal, the oil company had to reduce the price of the museum by $18.

Roger Houston Ogden once dreamed of being governor of Louisiana. Instead, the wealthy developer built his legacy behind the ornate doors of his white-columned, upper Audubon district mansion, where he amassed one of the largest collections of Southern art in the world. When city leaders cut the ribbon in August at the multitiered $21-million Ogden Museum of Southern Art on Camp Street, Ogden's ambition to publicly serve his native South was realized.

A multimillion-dollar collection of original work by famed Pop Art icon Andy Warhol was stolen last week from a Los Angeles home, police said Friday. On Sept. 3, a housekeeper for noted art collector Richard L. Weisman walked into the dining room of Weisman's residence and saw that 11 large portraits that had been on the walls the day before were gone, according to Det. Donald Hrycyk, head of the LAPD's art theft detail. The housekeeper called police, and investigators soon brought in Hrycyk, who has spent years chasing forgers and thieves in the shady art underworld.

"The advantage of not being able to produce art is that you can spend all your energy looking at art," said Don Rubell, whose family of self-confessed contemporary art fanatics is perpetually in search of the next addition to its 5,000-piece collection. Pleased to have uttered a complete sentence without being interrupted by Mera, his wife and collecting partner of nearly 45 years, he eased into a knowing smile as she jumped in to explain how their collecting obsession works.

"A COLLECTION of everything. So big it can never be cataloged or appraised. Enough for 10 museums. The loot of the world." That's the description of the art collection in "Citizen Kane," Orson Welles' masterpiece inspired by William Randolph Hearst. And the 1941 film has left an indelible impression of a voracious accumulator who focused on quantity, not quality. Art history has been no kinder to Hearst, whose mining inheritance financed a media empire and an enormous art collection that filled six palatial dwellings -- including Hearst Castle, the 250,000-acre, 165-room estate that overlooks San Simeon on the Pacific Coast.

I'm no fan of public art museums exhibiting private collections. The negatives so far outweigh the positives that such shows hurt, rather than help, a museum's mission. The latest example is "Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.: Selections From the Cheech Marin Collection," which opened recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The clumsy title is the least of its problems. "Los Angelenos" is a smaller, more focused version of "Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge."

Jennifer Bornstein was a kid in a candy store -- with almost half a year to gorge herself. When Hammer Museum curator Allegra Pesenti asked Bornstein to rummage through the institution's huge collection of graphic work and put together a show of whatever she fancied, the Los Angeles artist was thrilled. Five months later she was exhausted. "I can't believe how much work it was," Bornstein says. "I thought it was going to be a breeze. It wasn't. I have a lot of respect for curators."

Two days, two modern art masterpieces, two record-breaking auction prices -- and one buyer: Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. A respected art publication says London-based Abramovich was the anonymous buyer of Francis Bacon's "Triptych" and Lucian Freud's "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping," which sold at separate New York auctions last week for a total of $120 million. Abramovich represents a new breed of super-rich collector from emerging economies -- such as China, the Middle East and, especially, Russia -- that is buoying the art market through tough economic times.

Once upon a time--many decades ago, when high-level art dealing was a relatively leisurely business--the private chambers of prestigious art galleries were scenes of seduction and drama. Operating well out of the public eye in well-appointed "closing" rooms, gentlemanly merchants finessed deals with Old World ceremony as they persuaded the nouveaux riches to build collections of works by European Old Masters, French Impressionists and early Modernists.

Habibollah Sadeghi looks vaguely irritated to see me: not surprised, seeing as he has spent the last 10 days evading my phone calls, letters and polite appeals delivered through intermediaries. He knows I want to see his Picassos. He doesn't want to show them to me. But Iranian hospitality being what it is, Sadeghi is forced to invite me into his office for tea. "I got your letter," he says. "Frankly, I was somewhat offended that you seem to think our paintings are like some big nuclear secret.

Bank of America has launched a free exhibition and loan program that will make its vast art collection available to museums around the world. Participating institutions may organize shows from the bank's holding of paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs or select one of about 30 prepackaged exhibitions. The bank will pay all expenses -- crating, shipping, insurance and marketing. Twenty-six exhibitions are planned over the next two years, including a survey of contemporary art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia this summer and prints by David Hockney, Jim Dine and Richard Diebenkorn at the St. Louis University Museum of Art in the fall.

Fisk University broke the terms of a donation from painter Georgia O'Keeffe but shouldn't lose the art collection to a New Mexico museum, a judge ruled in Nashville. Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle permanently banned any sale of the 101-piece collection and set an October deadline for Fisk to retrieve the artwork from storage and put it on display. Lyle had rejected several previous attempts by the cash-strapped school to sell artworks, including O'Keeffe's signature 1927 oil painting "Radiator Building -- Night, New York."