GREYSTONE SOUGHT FOR ART CACHE

Negotiations to turn the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills into an art museum are entering final stages, The Times has learned. If plans are approved, the grand old estate will become the home for the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation’s multimillion-dollar collection of contemporary art.

“We have been negotiating seriously for some time and we’re very close to a meeting of the minds,” said attorney Mark Weisman, a nephew of industrialist Frederick R. Weisman. “But all that means is that we have an understanding,” he cautioned, noting that the proposed lease cannot be executed until the Beverly Hills City Council calls a public hearing and approves the agreement. The attorney declined to speculate on the timetable, but said he hoped the hearing would be held “within a month.”

“I don’t expect the city to reject it, but any deal we make with the Weisman group is contingent on approval of the city attorney and the City Council of Beverly Hills,” said Frederick M. Nicholas, chairman of the Greystone Foundation.

The 55-room mansion, built in the late ‘20s atop an 18.6-acre hillside estate at Loma Vista Drive and Doheny Road, has been vacant since the American Film Institute’s $1-a-year lease expired in 1981. If the Weisman proposal is accepted, the Beverly Hills landmark will house major works by such contemporary luminaries as Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and Ellsworth Kelly.

Approval of the lease would also bring a major cache of art to a building that once lost an important collection. In 1964, the Beverly Hills City Council approved a plan for the mansion to house uraninum magnate Joseph H. Hirshhorn’s collection, but a rift developed and the collection was subsequently given to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Weisman, 73, became enamored with the Abstract Expressionists and began collecting in the ‘50s. His foundation (formed in 1982 as one of several art holdings in the Weisman family) now owns more than 200 pieces. They range from key Abstract Expressionist paintings, such as Barnett Newman’s “Death of Euclid” (1947) to splashy contemporary works by New York graffiti artists. The collection has a strong centrol core of Pop art but encompasses everything from severe abstraction to raucous figurative painting.

Though predominantly American, the collection includes a few pieces by such well-known Europeans as Italian Sandro Chia and Germans Anselm Kiefer and Jorg Immendorff. Among the 20 or so California artists represented are Charles Arnoldi, Lita Albuquerque, Michael Dvortscak and Tom Wudl.

The planned museum would conclude a long search for a suitable Greystone tenant. The City of Beverly Hills, which bought the former Doheny estate in 1965 for $1.1 million, received two proposals for the property three years ago, but neither materialized. One was a plan for UCLA to use the mansion as an artists’ and scholars’ retreat and a center for cultural programs. The other was an offer from a wealthy Beverly Hills couple, Bernard and Dona Solomon, to buy or lease the property and use it as their home and a semiprivate museum for their art collection.

The Weisman proposal developed after the Beverly Hills City Council established the Greystone Citizens Committee to study uses for the property. In July, 1984, the council accepted the committee’s recommendation to turn over Greystone to an independent nonprofit foundation empowered to find a use for Greystone, negotiate an arrangement and bring the proposal back to the council for action.

The new Greystone Foundation, composed of the same 14 people who served on the committee, recommended two potential tenants: the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation and the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

According to Nicholas, the trustees felt that an art museum would best serve the city’s interest, provided the institution pay expenses and maintenance and restore Greystone to its former splendor. Nicholas was authorized to enter into negotiations and a preliminary lease was approved by the Greystone Foundation. Negotiations on final changes are in progress.

If approved, the museum will be open to the public, but reservations will be required to control parking and protect the residential neighborhood from pollution, Nicholas said.

The museum is not expected to open before 1988, according to Luisa Kreisberg, Weisman’s press agent. Extensive renovation of the building is required to meet earthquake codes and to restore the mansion.

The constantly growing Frederick R. Weisman Foundation Collection is currently in Israel as part of a two-year traveling schedule, according to curator Nora Halpern. Southern Californians got a look at it early last year, when the collection appeared at the Palm Springs Desert Museum. When it leaves Tel Aviv, Halpern says the exhibition will split, with half sent on a European itinerary and half to Asia.

Times staff writer Barbara Isenberg contributed to this story.