WHAT DOCTOR ORDERED FOR ART CENTER’S DEBUT

Two passions animate Dr. Vance E. Kondon--medicine and art collecting.

Kondon was talking about one of these loves Wednesday when a telephone call demanded his attention for the other.

A pregnant patient approaching her time for delivery was experiencing difficulties that he had foreseen. The doctor discussed the case over the telephone matter-of-factly. His final words were: “We’ll section her.”

The physician’s argot for a Caesarean section comes as easily to Kondon’s lips as do the names of the painters from his favorite style of art, German Expressionism: Klee, Felixmuller, Beckman, Kirchner, Dix, Munter, Pechstein, Nolde and Schlemmer.

Kondon is one of San Diego’s premier art collectors, and his collection will become a part of the history of the San Diego Art Center, which will open its first show in its temporary quarters in Horton Plaza on Saturday with “Selections from the Vance E. Kondon Collection.”

The exhibition, which runs through Feb. 15, will focus on European Expressionism, not just the Germans, whose brilliantly colorful, stridently angular works Kondon adores. Bold colors and a heady mixture of elements from Cubism, medieval German woodcuts, primitive cultures and even Impressionism came together in Expressionism, that reactionary art spawned in the early years of this century by romantic young artists who were tired of the pretty pictures being painted by their teachers.

Kondon, one of the city’s handful of major art collectors, explained his love affair with art: “The reason I got turned on by the Germans is that they were a kind of revolutionary and exciting and forthright and down to earth painters. There’s a vitality in their work. They’re kind of a sensual people. I was fascinated by the fresh images, their vibrant use of colors and the exciting manner in which they depicted startling events. These were not pretty pictures you would expect to see hanging in some bourgeois home.”

Kondon’s enthusiasm for acquiring art and for his particular field of medicine come together in Expressionism.

“I’m a gynecologist/obstetrician and I deal with women a lot. That turns me on. There are a lot of women in the collection, a lot of nudes,” he said. “It must tie in with something.”

The Art Center show (hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week) will highlight approximately 45 paintings, drawings and prints from Kondon’s collection of early 20th-Century works, primarily German Expressionists from two generations. By Wednesday Kondon had prepared about 60 paintings to be taken to the Art Center. With about 15 more than the show required, the extras would give flexibility in installing the show. But there were no blank walls at his home. Abstract paintings and large Minimalist works dominated the walls, while colorful primitive Mexican toys and figures occupied a section of the floor.

“The main joy of collecting is having it around you,” he said, “being surrounded by these things of beauty. I would imagine that for anyone who collects anything--stamps, coins or bottles--acquisition is important: I’ve got it and it’s mine.”

Yet Kondon has readily shared his treasures with San Diego. Paintings from his collection have been seen in exhibitions at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and at the San Diego Museum of Art.

Collecting, he said, gets in the blood: “A real collector will go into hock up to his ears, to get something he wants.”

He recalled a painting by Oskar Schlemmer that he saw on one of his many trips to European galleries. The asking price was $10,000. Kondon gave a firm offer of $8,000 and said he would call back within three days after returning home and checking his finances.

“I called them and they said someone had offered $10,000 and they had sold it. So you learn: You see it, you buy it.”

The fact that many of these paintings have been seen before--about half a dozen have not--takes nothing away from Kondon. It does raise questions, however, for the Art Center, a contemporary art museum, which plans to convert the Balboa Theater into a permanent home within two years.

Why did Sebastian (Lefty) Adler, the director of the Art Center, choose as his first show a collection that had been seen before?

“This is the seventh-largest city in the country, and it has very few key collections,” Adler said. “Some of these have been seen in La Jolla and in Balboa Park. I feel, being downtown, there’s a total new audience in the community. And Vance is a trustee (of the Art Center).

“It was a very key period in art. They paid so much attention to the gesture, from a painterly standpoint, and to color.”

One of Kondon’s paintings that will not appear in the show is a drawing by Egon Schiele.

“I guess you would say that this is a woman pleasuring herself,” Kondon said, after taking the painting from an upstairs wall. “They didn’t want anything this controversial in the show. In any other city of this size, it wouldn’t matter. But San Diego still isn’t ready for this kind of art.”

Ida Rigby, an art historian and professor at San Diego State University who is a nationally recognized authority on Expressionism, assisted in the selection of works for the show, as she did in the 1984 Kondon show at the Museum of Art.