ART GALLERY’S SUCCESS IS A COMPLEX RIDDLE

“A riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma,” Winston Churchill’s one-liner about the nature of the Soviet Union, comes to mind when trying to understand why Jose Tasende and his art gallery have flourished in La Jolla.

The Tasende Gallery is not just the ne plus ultra of San Diego art galleries--it’s known better in Europe than in San Diego, according to La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art Director Hugh Davies. Davies says it is indeed fortuitous that Tasende is in San Diego.

However, Tasende has no illusions about selling art here.

For all of La Jolla’s vaunted exclusivity as a home for the rich and richer, the area and the rest of San Diego County are hardly large or sophisticated enough to support an art gallery like Tasende’s. Since he opened in 1979, only a dozen San Diego collectors have bought from him, Tasende says.

“Art is not an extension of your personality out here,” Tasende says, comparing Southern California’s wealthy to New York society. “People here prefer to be represented by a Rolls Royce rather than have one very expensive piece of art by someone that their friends don’t know. Here, you observe more culture among young people, but they don’t have money,” at least not for the quality artists Tasende shows.

Tasende lives with his wife, daughter and son above the beige stucco art gallery at 820 Prospect St. When he moved his gallery and family from Acapulco to La Jolla in 1979, Tasende knew Southern California had few major collectors. Most of his business would have to be elsewhere.

The mystery of Tasende’s success begins to clear when you realize the astuteness of his eye for artists and his undeniable business sense. But the riddle of Tasende is that he is involved in the art world at all.

Until his early 30s, he played professional jai alai, making the rounds of Mexico City, Acapulco, Tijuana, and Palm Beach and Tampa, Fla.

Tasende and his widowed mother had emigrated to Guadalajara, Mexico, when he was still in school, from the Basque Country--Tasende bristles only partly in jest at a suggestion that he really means Spain. He quit jai alai in 1966--”I was never the best”--and opened an art gallery in Acapulco with a $5,000 stake from his mother.

Completely inexperienced, he soon was selling to wealthy American tourists and upgrading his stable of artists. Asked why he picked art, Tasende replies, “I don’t know how to answer that question. If I had it to do again, I would be a movie director.”

His sense of humor and an eye for the blue chip artist must be a factor in Tasende’s success although he credits luck for much of it.

He is extremely loyal to the artists he represents, a trait repaid by the artists, who often give him first crack at new works. One of his first artists in 1966 was Mexican painter Jose Louis Cuevas. Cuevas is still represented by Tasende.

Tasende speaks Spanish, Basque and Italian in addition to English. He moved to the United States for professional and personal reasons. “I wanted to be closer to my clients, and I wanted this life for my girl and my boy. I like this country more than any other in the world.”

So far Tasende has eschewed U.S. art stars in favor of Europeans. You won’t find a Motherwell, Pollock, Johns, Stella, Kelly, Oldenburg or Lichtenstein in Tasende’s stable. Instead he represents a select but acclaimed international collection--”absolutely blue chip modern masters,” Davies says--including Italian artists Marino Marini and Giacomo Manzu, Chilean-French painter Roberto Matta and English sculptors Lynn Chadwick and Henry Moore.

“It’s a matter of quality,” he said when asked why he doesn’t represent more American artists. “I can’t have everyone. I represent the best ones in modern art.”

But Tasende finds it ironic that local private art collectors trust New York dealers more than him. “They come here to buy something and they ask advice in New York,” Tasende said. More ironic, “People from here and Beverly Hills buy my pieces from dealers in New York. They’re unsecure in the local atmosphere.”

If not widely known in San Diego, Tasende’s name commands instant recognition in national art circles. “He’s well-connected with Henry Moore . . . deals with major 20th-Century artists,” said Morgan Spangle, manager of New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery.

“I’ve known Tasende for a number of years,” said Bud Holland, director of Chicago’s B.C. Holland Gallery. “I don’t know anybody who functions the way he does. He represents a narrow band of artists and tends to deal with them rather intensively. He shows their work in depth.”

A recent visit to Tasende’s office sanctum found the gallery director talking animatedly to a New York publisher about an upcoming monograph on a fellow Basque, sculptor Eduardo Chillida. The publication date is tied to Tasende’s opening of a Chillida exhibition Oct. 25. Tasende is very proud that the book will also be published in the Basque language.

In Tasende’s office a foot-high stack of the page roughs for the Chillida catalogue covered a coffee table. Tasende likes to publish expensive, full-color exhibit catalogues and advertises heavily in journals such as Art in America to compensate for his gallery’s location far from New York City’s madding art crowd.

Tasende says the Chillida exhibit will cost him $250,000. “It is only for outsiders. I would have to sell $1 million in San Diego in one year to recoup that,” he says in wonder at the preposterousness of that happening.

So how will he recover his costs?

“Last year 75% of my sales were to dealers. I travel, myself, a lot--five or six times a year to New York, four or five trips to Europe, two or three trips to Chicago and Dallas.”

At 53, Tasende remains energetic. The once wiry frame carries a little more weight than when he used to play jai alai . But he still has the eye and the nerves of steel it takes to play jai alai or at the top of the art world.