ART REVIEW : BAKER’S DOZENS: SAMPLING 186 FLAVORS

“My idea around 1955 was that nobody but myself was the loser if I bought a bad picture,” reads an entry in Richard Brown Baker’s diary on art collecting. He never did, if the hundreds of artworks he left at home are as good as the 166 in “Fortissimo! Thirty Years From the Richard Brown Baker Collection of Contemporary Art,” at the San Diego Museum of Art to Aug. 11.

Not every piece measures up to Hans Hofmann’s “Fortissimo,” the vigorous Abstract Expressionist canvas that inspired the exhibition title. Nor to Franz Kline’s black-and-white abstraction, “Wanamaker Block,” the most celebrated work in the collection. Dozens of minor works lack the impact of Roy Lichtenstein’s “Blam” (transforming a comic-strip plane crash into the high art of Pop irony), not to mention Jackson Pollock’s drip painting, “Arabesque,” Duane Hanson’s hyper-real sculptures of defeated men (one dragged low by drugs, the other crushed by labor) and William Beckman’s straight-arrow “Self-Portrait.”

There are great gaps in the sprawling exhibition--no major works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns or Frank Stella, for example--but if Baker stashed away a few duds, no one in San Diego will be the wiser. The show is such a startling affirmation of aesthetic quality and collecting passion, it’s likely to propel would-be acquisitors to action.

“Get there first, with adequate credit, and decide promptly,” Baker implores fellow buyers as he offers his “theory for the collection of contemporary art” in diary selections, reproduced in the exhibition catalogue and placards. “If the work is as good as you think it is, other people may think the same. You don’t need cash. All you need is credit and confidence in your own eye.”

Such market advice, liberally sprinkled through the exhibition, is a decidedly mixed blessing. On the up side, it is an undeniable part of the intrigue of collecting. Baker gleefully admits the thrill of recognizing genius early and of feeling smug about snapping up bargains whose escalating worth is established later. He never sells his art and he plans to give it to Yale University, so he can’t be accused of buying for investment. Furthermore, his passion for the art surpasses his competitive spirit.

On the down side, however, the show’s emphasis on money matters is offensive. Once you learn (from text posted by the artwork, no less) that Baker paid $4,500 less 10% in four installments for Willem de Kooning’s “Collage and Crayon,” you immediately start wondering how much he paid for the other pieces. Market machinations have so polluted the aesthetic enjoyment of art in recent years that this is only the latest step in the march toward seeing art as a commodity. It’s an ominous step, though, and extremely regrettable. If crowing about prices didn’t seem so indigenous to Baker’s infectious ardor and if he didn’t love art more than money, the financial commentary would be a fatal deterrent to enjoying the amazing mass of material he has collected.

“Fortissimo!” is an exuberant exhibition, from the exclamation point in its title to the breathless diary confessions on museum walls. And the aesthetic spirit nearly keeps pace with the text. Visitors are predictably startled by Hanson’s “Man in Chair With Beer” at the entrance to the show, but the first galleries of Abstract Expressionist works are no less compelling than the unexpected sight of a grubby laborer collapsed in an easy chair.

The show proceeds more or less chronologically, beginning with work made and bought in the ‘50s, when Baker’s collecting activity was an anomaly. He had retired, in 1948, from government service. Baker’s art acquisitions were financed by funds from his family’s estate and sales of property.

Even in the early days, as one of a very few private collectors seriously interested in vanguard art, he had an eye for quality and an unusual range of preference. He bought works he loved by Kurt Schwitters, Robert Motherwell, Ben Nicholson and Pierre Soulages. He squirreled away fine samples of Jean Dubuffet, Alexander Calder, Antoni Tapies and William Baziotes, all within a few years--and that was only the beginning.

In the ‘60s, Baker responded to Pop by acquiring prime pieces by Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist, along with less important examples by Tom Wesselmann and Wayne Thiebaud. Baker’s choice of Rosenquist’s “Flower Garden” represents the collector at his best, selecting a powerful work that isn’t a trademark example. In this enormously affecting black-and-white painting, the artist has used a cropped composition instead of his more familiar collage-like approach to picture three raised hands and a drooping athlete’s body. The human flowers convey a garden of emotion by evoking feelings of vulnerability, exhaustion and supplication.

As time progresses within the show, Baker’s eclectic enthusiasm grows wider, scooping up everything from the captivating eccentricities of H. C. Westermann, William T. Wiley and Lucas Samaras to mainstream abstraction. He makes room for English artist Howard Hodgkin’s resplendent “Moonlight” painting, and for Chicago artist Roger Brown’s eerie fantasy of a “Presidential Commemorative--The Great Wall” taking place in China.

Baker gets carried away by Photo Realism, springing for major canvases by Robert Cottingham, Tom Blackwell and Richard McLean, then dips into adventurous new work by Susan Hall, Jonathan Borofsky and Richard Bosman. There’s no indication that Baker has roundly endorsed the current epidemic of Neo-Expressionism, but such is the variety of his appetite that there’s no reason to believe he would shun it without thorough consideration.

It’s tempting to poke at the lapses in the exhibition (because it looks so much like a historical survey) or to whine about its lack of focus. But that’s ultimately beside the point: how one man built a personally meaningful and aesthetically superior collection.