Legacy Sculpts Museum’s Collection

It was the mid-1960s and the San Diego Museum of Art had only recently opened its sculpture garden. The only problem was that the museum’s collection included very little sculpture.

Into the breach stepped Norton S. Walbridge, a private collector and member of the museum’s board of trustees, who made the museum an offer it couldn’t refuse.

If the museum would acquire a large sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, Walbridge would donate three more monumental pieces by sculptors Aristide Maillol, Marino Marini and David Smith, major forces in 20th-Century art.

Since then, the late Norton Walbridge and his widow, Barbara, have donated more than three dozen paintings and sculptures to the museum. Through their passion for art and their generosity, this pair of collectors altered forever the nature of the museum’s collection.

“The Walbridges brought it (the collection) into the 20th Century,” said the museum’s curator of American Art, Martin E. Petersen. Now the museum is honoring the Walbridges with an extensive survey of their art collection, including various pieces they also donated to the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. Titled “The Walbridge Legacy,” the 90-piece exhibition opened Saturday and runs through May 29.

Walbridge, the former chairman of the board of Dart Industries, and his wife taught themselves about modern art. They began collecting with the more traditional figurative paintings and eventually developed an appreciation for abstract Expressionism.

“We admired too many artists with great ranges of interests,” Barbara Walbridge wrote in the catalogue to the exhibit. “We became a little more daring and contemporary, bringing ‘realism’ and the ‘abstract’ closer together, but all of it was to our own taste.”

Acquiring the works of both lesser-known figurative watercolorists and heavyweight abstract Expressionists, the Walbridges assembled a wide-ranging and eclectic collection of modern art over a period of 25 years.

From Georgia O’Keeffes and a late piece by Pablo Picasso to the strong watercolors of New Yorker Chen Chi, the Walbridge collection covers a gamut of styles.

Among the few local collectors to acquire on such a scale, the Walbridges have been extremely generous with their art. In this day of shrinking federal government support for the arts, such patrons are “almost a necessity” to any community, Petersen said.

“We need our de Medicis,” he said. “It would be awfully dull if we didn’t have beautiful things around us. We need something to act as a foil for all our scientific information.”