ARTWORK ORANGE : <i> The Southland Becomes a Hothouse of Activity </i>

It was, said the caller, an incredible opportunity. A New York collector was selling his rare Frank Stella black painting--for more than $1 million. If TV producer Douglas Cramer were willing to go to New York that weekend to look at it, a “major West Coast dealer” would personally take him over to see it.

“I could tell no one,” recalls Cramer, co-producer of “Dynasty.” “But as I was going into the apartment, David Geffen (L.A.-based record/film mega-producer) was walking out. And as I was leaving, Donald Bren (Irvine Co. chairman) was arriving.”

None of them bought the painting--Cramer says it’s still for sale a year later--but the story illustrates the secrecy of the art world, a largely uncharted landscape peopled lavishly with the rich and famous. And more and more key players have Los Angeles addresses.

Patricia Hamilton, a New York art agent, sold 60% of sculptor Peter Reginato’s SoHo show last year to L.A. collectors. In February, she rented a space here, shipped out nine sculptures and sold every one of them at $12,000 to $25,000 apiece.

“I could have sold three more,” she said just after closing her show at 57th Street West on La Brea. “My feeling is that I beat every New York dealer out here by one year. They’re going to be out here in droves next year.”

Calendar interviews with dozens of artists, dealers, collectors and museum executives in Los Angeles and New York yielded nearly unanimous optimism about Los Angeles’ future as an art market, even while admitting the city has a long way to go. New York dealers gush about their L.A. clients, dealers in both cities are trying to become bicoastal, and a whole new generation of gallery owners is opening shop here.

Says Arnold Glimcher, president of New York’s prominent Pace Gallery: “Los Angeles is the most promising new art market in the country.”

Hollywood’s powerful make deals in such art-filled restaurants as Trump’s and 72 Market Street, and throw at-home dinner parties surrounded by artworks that would make some museum directors weep with envy. Not only are there more museums and working artists here than ever before, but there are chunky sculptures all over downtown and in shopping malls from Century City to South Coast Plaza.

“Los Angeles is the trendiest city in the world, and contemporary art is in ,” says arts consultant Nancy Kattler. “People have to become aware of art if for no other reason than by osmosis.”

New York dealer Andre Emmerich calls it “a peculiar phenomenon in the art market that’s not widely understood. Most other goods follow a supply and demand cycle, where as demand increases, supply shrinks and prices go up. With art, supply creates demand. When people are exposed to art, many people respond by wanting it.”

Los Angeles hasn’t always been a place where hospitals and banks hold art exhibitions and thousands of people sign up for paid tours of artists’ studios. The County Museum of Art didn’t even move into its Wilshire Boulevard home until the mid-’60s, and the J. Paul Getty Museum was operating out of oilman Getty’s Malibu house as recently as the early ‘70s.

Today, Los Angeles houses many important public and private collections of early American art, Old Masters and others. But well aware of the scarcity and cost of a Rembrandt, for instance, the area’s dealers have specialized in the art of our time. Contemporary art is particularly popular with new collectors because, unlike art of earlier periods, it is always available and much more affordable. It seems easier to learn about contemporary art than, say, Byzantine mosaics, and collections can be assembled relatively quickly.

Just how many collections there are, of course, nobody really knows. People exaggerate and there are no reliable statistics on gallery sales. Dealers can name the mega-buyers like Los Angeles-based businessmen Frederick Weisman and Eli Broad, but everyone throws up his hands on an estimate of how many people here are spending less than two Mercedeses worth a year for art.

Some of the unknown details of the art market’s activities may be brought to light beginning Tuesday when local art dealer Douglas Chrismas is scheduled for a preliminary hearing in Los Angeles Municipal Court. Chrismas faces seven felony charges that he stole more than $1 million worth of art by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.

What people keep going back to is the potential of the Los Angeles market. The wealthy J. Paul Getty Museum is expanding. The County Museum of Art’s new Robert O. Anderson Building and the permanent home of the Museum of Contemporary Art both open later this year. Greater museum activity is expected not only to help curtail the exodus of Eastern-bound artists, art dealers and collections, but also to stimulate more local art buying.

Another lure is that serious collecting provides ready entre to the city’s glittery social world of artists, dealers and other celebrities. Geffen and Steve Martin are both on the County Museum’s board, and the growing number of Hollywood collectors can usually guarantee a star or two at a post-opening dinner party. Among the guests at Cramer’s gathering earlier this month for artist Eric Fischl: Joan Collins and Carrie Fisher.

Much of the current “Los Angeles art market” actually takes place in New York.

A day touring that city’s galleries with L.A. industrialist Eli Broad, founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, finds considerable coddling and attention. Dealers at both large and small galleries know him on sight and make knowledgeable comments about his collections. They greet him warmly and walk him through exhibitions. In nearly every case, the walk ends in the back room, where they pull paintings out from shelves and transparencies from drawers.

One dealer tells Broad, “You’re literally the only person I’ve shown this to,” as he takes the collector to a back-room viewing of a new young artist, rapidly agreeing to put three paintings on reserve and send transparencies by Federal Express for Broad’s curator to review. Broad, like many other major collectors, also has access to artists’ studios--he feels that great collections are built buying “often before the paint is dry”-- and a half-hour stop at Frank Stella’s studio results in the purchase of a new metalwork priced in the six figures.

The conservatively dressed executive seems simultaneously charmed and embarrassed by the attention. Dealer Larry Gagosian rushes out of a restaurant into pouring rain when he sees Broad getting out of a car on SoHo’s West Broadway. Minutes later, dealer Leo Castelli is able to get artist Jasper Johns on the phone for Broad, usually no easy task.

In galleries later that day, artists George Segal and David Salle each greet Broad by name and stop to chat, while lesser-known artist Suzanne Joelson is clearly thrilled when Broad stops by her Canal Street studio and then invites her to join his entourage for lunch.

All that socializing is not just fun for most collectors, but part of what Cramer calls “The Hunt.” Hot artists like Stella or Fischl, currently on view at both the Daniel Weinberg and Larry Gagosian galleries in West Hollywood, have waiting lists of collectors. Cramer and Broad are on such lists, and, says Cramer, “to get on that list, you need to know the dealer well, have the dealer know your collection and know you. It helps to meet the artists, develop friendships, and have the accessibility that lets you get into the studio to see the work.”

That’s important, say collectors, because shows of hot artists like Fischl are reportedly entirely sold-out by opening night. Says Cramer, who maintains frequent telephone contact with eight New York dealers: “If the dealers and artist know you, that you’re serious about buying and that there’s a passion there, your name moves up on the list. It sounds insane that you would go through that to spend that kind of money, but it’s exciting at the same time.”

Cramer recalls a crisis with “Dynasty” once kept him from rushing to New York on a special Stella offering; one week later, half the artworks were gone, “and they were selling at nearly $200,000 each.” Broad jokes about competing with English advertising executive and legendary collector Charles Saatchi, “who has the advantage of being able to leave London at 11 a.m. and be in Manhattan at 9 a.m. via the Concorde. If I leave at 11 a.m., I don’t get to New York until 7 p.m., so Saatchi has a 10-hour advantage.”

Despite all their out-of-town purchases, however, collectors Broad and Weisman, each buying for personal, corporate and foundation collections, report increased shopping here. ‘It used to be that I would be buying (works by Los Angeles-based artist) Ron Davis in New York,” says Weisman, whose multimillion-dollar Frederick R. Weisman Foundation collection will move to Beverly Hills’ Greystone Mansion in 1988. “I buy more internationally than in Los Angeles, but I’m buying more in Los Angeles now than I did a year ago and more a year ago than I did two years ago.”

Broad estimates he’s making 40% of his purchases in town these days, while collector Bea Gersh says the major part of the well-known collection she and her husband Phil have amassed over the years was bought here.

“I think we have good galleries here,” says art patron Robert Halff, whose collection is a frequent stop for touring out-of-town museum curators and collectors, “and the way they (those galleries) stay good and get better is if people buy from them.”

Halff certainly buys at home. Offering a tour of his Beverly Hills home, modest for its neighborhood, the retired advertising executive pauses to tell a story about the Lichtenstein on one wall, the Samaras on a table, the Kline in the dining room. Refreshing his memory from yellowing art catalogues, Halff estimates that he’s purchased 80-85% of his collection from Los Angeles dealers over the last 25 years.

New York dealer Mary Boone, in town for artist Fischl’s openings two weeks ago, calls this “a particularly international time for artists, galleries and collectors. Less and less is New York the sole center of art activity.”

Yet New York remains the art world’s acknowledged heart, pumping blood out to the extremities. Says Gilbert Edelson, administrative vice president of the Art Dealers Assn. of America: “There are more people buying and collecting art today than ever before, and if you are a major collector in contemporary art today, you have to come to New York just as in the ‘20s, you had to go to Paris.”

Sotheby’s closed its Los Angeles auction house four years ago in part because the area’s collectors persisted in buying and selling in New York. Even a local booster like Lenore Greenberg, president of the Museum of Contemporary Art, says matter-of-factly, “If you’re a serious art collector, you’re either in New York or on the phone to New York.”

Dealers in both cities agree that if a collector is looking for a national or international artist, the widest choice is still in New York. Insurance is so high on expensive artworks, says one dealer, that local dealers can’t yet maintain the inventories their longer-established, generally wealthier New York counterparts can.

Such important local artists as Richard Diebenkorn have no Los Angeles dealer at all. In fact, at Knoedler’s Diebenkorn show in New York last fall, 3 of the 11 paintings were sold to Los Angeles collectors, reportedly at upwards of $300,000 each. That meant those three paintings had to be shipped from Diebenkorn’s Santa Monica studio to New York, then shipped back to Los Angeles collectors’ homes.

Every Los Angeles artist queried for this article conceded that national reputations require New York representation at one point or another, and many of today’s top-selling young New York artists were either raised or trained here. As recently as February, Los Angeles artist Mickey Kaplan opened a cooperative gallery called LAART in New York’s SoHo district where 60 Los Angeles-area artists--including Kaplan--have put up $670 apiece “to exhibit essentially for New York dealers in the pursuit of New York representation. Sales are secondary.”

Besides the fact that Los Angeles no longer has a major auction house, nearly all of the nation’s art journals and magazines originate in New York. “If you put out an equal amount of energy, the payoff is much larger in N.Y. than in L.A.,” says artist John Baldessari, whose studio is in Santa Monica but who says his primary U.S. dealer has always been in New York. “You might be in people’s memories, but there’s no written commentary. So it’s like spitting against the wind.”

Veteran dealer Herbert Palmer expresses the frustration of putting energy into shaping an artist’s career only to have that artist head east, but artists argue why shouldn’t they? “In New York, a dealer is more likely to have the capital, connections, moxie and prestige to make an artist’s career,” says artist June Wayne, who has representation only in New York. “ A good dealer has to combine the attributes of (art authority) Bernard Berenson, (businessman) Lee Iacocca and (bank robber) Willie Sutton. I’d love to find someone like that here.”

Former Los Angeles dealers Irving Blum and Malinda Wyatt each speak of significant California business--Wyatt, now in New York’s East Village, says she sees more Los Angeles collectors there than she ever did at her gallery in L.A.’s Venice district--and nearly every dealer queried in any city estimated his or her sales at 50% out-of-town. People generally have more disposable time and money when traveling and gallery-going is a frequent diversion. “Tony Bill first became acquainted with my new work when he was in San Francisco,” says Venice-based artist Laddie John Dill, “and he lives right down the street.”

New York’s leadership in the art world also gives it art sold there the “stamp of approval.”

Betty Turnbull, former curator of exhibitions at the Newport Harbor Art Museum and co-owner of the TLK Gallery in Costa Mesa, closed that gallery last summer after nearly three years in part because she felt Orange County collectors seemed “to feel more secure going to New York and buying their art from name dealers. They needed that validation to be comfortable in making their choices.”

Dealers and museum people speak, generally off-the-record, of the collector’s need for “validation” of his choices, of the perennial hunt for art with “pedigree,” particularly when there’s a lot of money involved. “Collectors claim it’s the quality of the work, but it’s the prestige, salesmanship and sway (New York dealers) have over collectors,” says newcomer Michael Kohn, who opened a gallery here last summer.

Los Angeles dealer Patricia Faure calls it “Los Angeles’ inferiority complex” and cites the Asher/Faure gallery’s 1979 showing of a group of Morris Louis canvases “presented by” New York dealer Andre Emmerich. One day, recalls Faure, a Los Angeles collector walked into Emmerich’s New York gallery to buy a Morris Louis, was told all the best ones were out on the coast, and promptly bought a Helen Frankenthaler instead. “He just couldn’t believe that if the paintings were that good, they would be available in Los Angeles,” says Faure.

More and more, however, they are available locally as New York dealers formalize their relationships with Los Angeles galleries. Painters and sculptors represented by such major players as Emmerich, Castelli and Paula Cooper in New York are being marketed with increasing frequency in West Hollywood and Venice.

“If you work very hard and have to spend a high proportion of your money for a painting, you don’t do it on whim,” says Alan Shayne, president of Warner Bros. Television Programming, whose L.A. collection includes several paintings by prominent New York artists. “You look around to get the best work you can, and local dealers can often find that work for you in their travels.”

Even so successful a Los Angeles dealer as Margo Leavin considers the Los Angeles market “absolutely untapped,” and what dealers in both cities are working on now is broadening Los Angeles’ collector base. Everybody’s definition of a collector varies, but most speak of collectors as people who keep buying art long after they run out of wall space. They don’t have to spend $500,000 a year, but snaring one artwork at an art auction does not a collector make.

How many Los Angeles collectors are there? Art & Antiques magazine in March listed 16 Southern California art collectors in its annual “Top 100 Collectors in America”--among them Jack Nicholson and Barbra Streisand--and at least seven specialize in contemporary art. Barbara Pallenberg, fine arts director for Sotheby’s in Los Angeles, calls this Sotheby’s second-biggest market after New York for contemporary art.

“Los Angeles was like a border town 25 or 30 years ago,” says Pallenberg. “It has changed drastically, especially the last 10 years. And I think it will take another 15 years before it shakes down and you see a wide collecting base. . . . There’s a lot of new money here and a lot of people who have it are uneducated about how to spend it.”

People who live here don’t come from a tradition of collecting, observes collector Max Palevsky. “They are the kind of people who don’t have urban personalities. If you have an urban personality, you live in New York. Or London, Paris or around New York. If you live out here, you are someone who has other values. There are wonderful things to do here besides worrying about art.”

Yet producer Cramer and friends recently made a list of important local collectors who could host high-ticket art lunches in their homes and came up with 48 names. And longtime dealer Molly Barnes, who helped assemble collections for TV producer Norman Lear and others, estimates that collecting here has grown 100% from as recently as five years ago. Joni Gordon, who specializes in home-grown talent, reports the biggest two months in her 10-year-old Newspace gallery’s history.

Business collectors are also becoming more accustomed to buying locally, says Tressa Miller, director of cultural services for Security Pacific National Bank. She estimates that as much as 20% of contemporary art sales here and nationally can be attributed to business buying, noting that Security Pacific alone purchased 2,000 artworks last year from California galleries and artists.

In the past year or so, a dozen new galleries have opened in Los Angeles, most run by dealers under 35 who show young artists from both coasts. “Los Angeles was screaming for a new generation of dealers,” says one dealer, Fiona Whitney, 27, “and there seem to be enough of us to make an impact.”

SoHo dealer Lewis Baskerville, meanwhile, is planning to purchase a home here in part to serve as an informal exhibition space. He and partner Simon Watson may cooperate on Los Angeles shows, says Baskerville, “but those shows last for a month, and we’re interested in providing Los Angeles friends and collectors a (way) to look at work so there is a continuing profile for the artist.”

Virgnia Zabriskie, with galleries in Paris and New York, says that if she were starting over, she’d start here, and dealer Daniel Weinberg, who moved here in 1982 after 10 years in San Francisco, says he’s sorry he waited so long.

Tom Lutgen of the Times editorial library assisted with the research for this article.