COMMENTARY : After UCLA, Is Simon Still Headed West?

Norton Simon, the mercurial Medici of Los Angeles art, has done it again. After entering into negotiations to put his fabulously fine and immensely valuable $750-million collections under the stewardship of UCLA, the ever-restless Simon has backed out--again. Funny that it still surprises us.

Back in the ‘60s he negotiated with the County Museum of Art, stirring the hopes of scholarly aesthete, civic shaker and humble burgher alike, only to waltz away and establish a “museum without walls” touring parts of his collection across the country, igniting fires in eyes hungry for art from the Gulf Stream waters to the New York island.

When he finally settled in the old Pasadena Museum of Modern Art--renaming it for himself--the civic body heaved a sigh of relief. The great trove was here to stay.

Thousands of Old Masters, Impressionist and modern classics and Asian icons would remain in Pasadena to enrich the minds and hone the eyes of indigenous seekers and visitors from around the world. Oh, there was that one time when he got in a huff and threatened to bestow the Asian collection on his boyhood home in San Francisco, but it didn’t come to anything.

Simon has always felt underappreciated in L.A., but the resulting squabbles seemed more like family tiffs than serious grounds for divorce. It was going to be OK.

Final proof seemed to arrive 16 months ago when the Simon-UCLA deal was front-page news. Everyone was so jubilant that they kicked a disturbing piece of the story under the rug. It appeared that, wealthy as he is, Simon cannot by himself afford to endow his collections in perpetuity in their present Pasadena shrine. Something eventually has to happen to the collection. Either it stays intact, finding safe harbor in an institution with the stability and wealth to house, display and maintain it properly, or it has to be broken up and sold.

With the UCLA negotiations an undone deal, everything is up in the air again, masterpieces tumbling like a collapsing house of cards. Whoops, there goes the Rembrandt, and here comes the Tiepolo, floating like a cloud.

But was this just another failed Simon flirtation, or can we learn something from it? The story can cut a dozen ways. The popular version is bound to excite Pavlovian salivation under the general rubric of Life Styles of the Rich and Powerful. Journalists sit depressed over its confirmation of the ability of Olympian mortals and mighty institutions to withhold news from the public arena when they are of a mind. Evidently the deal broke down a scant four months into the talks. That was a year ago.

Those with a bent for the satirical and comical can get a mordant chuckle out of the vignettes floating out of a story that was only confirmed in an officially unofficial way by spokespersons intoning oblique euphemisms.

Unnamed sources leaked nice, gossipy--if predictable--rumors of wrangles over curatorial control and bureaucratic meddling. But the most delicious comedy bit was the tale that Simon was affronted by the idea there would be a big yellow and black Hertz rent-a-car agency hard by his museum, which was to be established in what is currently a UCLA parking lot in Westwood near Wilshire Boulevard.

To be fascinated by such tattle is human, but to focus on the spectacle of wrangling egos clawing for power and prestige is to miss the point that the point of all this is, in fact, a matter of immense cultural and educational benefit to the community in exchange for a little well-deserved recognition on the part of donors, fund-raisers and cautious officials who love the town.

Wait a minute. Isn’t that UCLA parking lot-cum-museum only a block or two from the recently announced site of the private museum for the collections Armand Hammer not long ago snatched back from the County Museum after 17 years of promising it would get them?

Right, same place.

Is it conceivable that Hammer planned the location of his museum thinking it would take on added luster in the glow of a Simon museum next door? Probably not. Too much like a “Dynasty” script.

This begins to seem like the crossing of two serious trends. One is the growing phenomenon of the boutique museum for private collections. The other is the longstanding local tradition that favors more cultural institutions in the western end of the city. (Recent arrivals may not be aware that--according to local lore--many of our cultural leaders who live in the Westside authentically believe that Los Angeles’ easternmost border is La Cienega Boulevard. To them, going downtown to the Music Center or the Museum of Contemporary Art or to Pasadena for the Simon is an act of holy sacrifice only to be endured in the name of culture.)

If further proof of the boutique-museum/West-end trend is needed, it is also said that contemporary collector Frederick Weisman has talked to UCLA in his quest for a haven for his sprawling collections.

Such rumors and facts strongly suggest that UCLA is being viewed as a prime location for museums bearing the names of private donors, just as Ivy League schools nurture galleries established by private donors. As a matter of fact, it’s a good idea.

It’s a good idea representing an option Simon has closed off. And it was not just another Simon negotiation. It represents a field of local choices for Simon that is narrowing precipitously. It also shows Simon--despite his longstanding prominence and the distinction of his collections--as a participant in an urgently timely phenomenon.

People of the stamp of Simon, Hammer and Weisman--so unlike in most ways--seem to share a consciousness that, despite staggering accomplishments in business, the real legacy they have to leave to the world is the art collections they have amassed, representing their finest human qualities and most altruistic impulses. They want to leave these collections intact to posterity. Forgivably, they want their names on them and sometimes are very exigent in that regard. Nonetheless forgivably because they are human.

Simon, who is 81 and ailing, now faces the hard choice of finding a home for the collection here or elsewhere or contemplating seeing it sold piecemeal to become a fading memory.

It is not inconceivable that he can find a museum elsewhere. There is not a museum--even a great museum--in the world that would not swoon to have it, including certainly New York’s mighty Metropolitan. But it already has its Lehman wing, and maybe one private fiefdom is enough.

So the world may potentially still be Simon’s oyster, but it is hard to imagine its terrain without the J. Paul Getty Trust. Here we have an art institution as rich as a royal principality whose main aesthetic problem is finding works of art of a quality to match its means.

If Simon allows the magnificent ensemble of his holdings to eventually go on the market, the Getty seems to be the sole entity outside a national government able to move in and buy it in job lots. This would solve a problem for the Getty, which would then have a superb collection at a stroke and no obligation to credit Simon for it save in the provenance list of catalogues. It would also solve a problem for this art-hungry art center of ours. We would still have the benefits of the Simon collection but with no particular reason to credit him for it.

It would thus appear that a wise fate is at play here offering Simon the opportunity to maintain the coherence and identity of his collection and the Getty the opportunity to have an appropriate collection. The Simon and Getty names are titanically independent in their way, but surely the benefit of an accommodation on both sides is self-evident.

Maybe a continued Simon Museum in Pasadena under the Getty aegis would represent the Solomonic solution. Maybe a Simon wing in the Getty’s planned new facility in Brentwood.

If Begin and Sadat could do it, surely Getty and Simon can manage.

Jimmy Carter, where are you when we need you?