Janss’ Art Cache to Go on Block : Real Estate Magnate Amassed Quality, Eclectic Collection

Twenty-two contemporary works, including a prime early painting by Francis Bacon that is expected to break the British artist’s record of $1.76 million, will be offered May 2. Four modern works, by Rene Magritte, Jean Delville, Giorgio Morandi and James Ensor, will be sold May 9 in a sale of Impressionist and modern art.

Though Janss and his family made their fortune in the American tradition of developing land--about 90,000 acres of Southern California property and ski resorts at Snowmass in Aspen, Colo., and Sun Valley, Idaho--Janss is revered in the art community as an eccentric, intuitive collector. He jumped to his death, at 74, on March 16 in Santa Monica, after suffering a stroke.

Enchanted by artists and adventurous dealers, Janss built a consistently high-quality, if eclectic, collection from sources all around the world. Pre-Columbian art, Mimbres pottery and antique chess sets mingled with contemporary masterpieces in his West Los Angeles home. His collecting was an intensely personal pursuit, and he never formed strong attachments to museums--nor gave them reason to expect that he might donate his collection to them.

“My father always wanted an auction. He had discussed it for years, and I approve of that. He didn’t want his collection entombed in some kind of shrine. He believed that the works have a life of their own,” said Janss’ daughter, Dagny Janss Corcoran, who owns Art Catalogues, an exhibition catalogue shop in West Hollywood.

Art walked into Janss’ life in the late ‘50s, according to Corcoran. “He was sitting up there in Thousand Oaks, working with his race horses or whatever he was doing at the time, and he just turned left,” she said.

Two of the people responsible for his change of direction were artist Sam Francis and Walter Hopps, the current director of the Menil Collection in Houston, who was a founder of the vanguard Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and a director of the Pasadena Art Museum in the late ‘50s and ‘60s.

According to Corcoran, Francis introduced himself after Janss boldly (and without much knowledge) stated in an interview that Francis, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock--the three contemporary American artists whose work he then owned--were the most important painters in the world. Meeting one artist led to another, and Janss found their ideas and life styles completely captivating, Corcoran said.

Meanwhile, Hopps became “a sort of professor” to Janss, opening doors for the collector and filling his head with new information but never making decisions for him, she said.

“Ed Janss, of all the major collectors I have known over the past 40 years, was unquestionably the most independent,” Hopps wrote.

Stories abound from Janss’ collecting years. There’s the one that New York dealer Leo Castelli tells about meeting the unconventional Californian who eventually became a good friend. “He walked into my gallery in 1963 from God knows where--looking ragged, as if he were from Texas or the desert--and said he wanted to buy a Rauschenberg.

“It was the end of the show and I told him that only a large one, ‘Die Hard,’ (an early silk-screened painting that is in the auction) was available. He said, ‘Fine. I’ll take that.’ When I told him the price was $16,000, he pulled a crumpled check out of his pocket and promptly filled it out,” Castelli recalled.

The tale of a David Hockney purchase in 1974 is even more picturesque: Janss plucked “A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style” from the sky. On the way to the Kasmin Gallery in London with Dagny, the collector first saw Hockney’s 12-foot-long canvas dangling from a crane while it was being loaded into an upstairs window of the gallery. Undaunted by his odd viewpoint and the painting’s plastic wrapping, he immediately decided to buy it.

“A Grand Procession,” a fantasy painted in 1961, is valued at $750,000 to $1 million--well above Hockney’s record of $647,680, set in December by “A Neat Lawn.” Painted while Hockney was a student at the Royal College of Art in London, the theatrical parade of strange personages was inspired by Constantine Cavafy’s 1904 poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians.” The painting is among early works that caught the attention of Hockney’s first dealer, John Kasmin, and is considered a seminal work because it foreshadows his later “stage” paintings and set designs.

Among other works set to leave the Janss collection and go out into the world are Bacon’s “Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh II,” valued at $2 million to $2.5 million. “There’s no question whatever” that the painting will reach or exceed that estimate, according to Lucy Mitchell-Inness, director of Sotheby’s contemporary art department.

The 1957 oil depicting a desolate artist trudging through a terrifyingly bleak landscape is one of six Bacon works inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s “The Painter on the Road to Tarascon,” which was destroyed during World War II. Bacon painted the version in the Janss collection after a trip to Tangiers and interpreted the theme of artist as haunted outsider in terms of the North African sun, using dark shadows and searing color.

Richard Diebenkorn’s 1959 oil, “Coffee,” may also set a record. The painting of a seated woman drinking a cup of coffee is valued at $800,000 to $1 million--close to the record $1.16 million paid last May for “July,” a similarly styled figurative work done two years earlier.

Three constructions by Joseph Cornell, a drawing and a sculpture by H.C. Westermannand a 1953 abstraction by Franz Kline will be offered in the May 2 sale. The auction roster also lists two paintings each by Jean Dubuffet, Sam Francis, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston and Robert Rauschenberg and two groups of ceramic cups by Kenneth Price.

One piece, Edward Kienholz’s 1959 mixed-media construction called “Walter Hopps, Hopps, Hopps” ($60,000 to $80,000), is a witty tribute to an art world impresario who helped shape Los Angeles’ development as an art center and became Janss’ friend and adviser.

Corcoran and Mitchell-Inness characterize the Janss collection as one of personal choices, loosely woven together by a thread of Surrealism. Though only Magritte’s 1946 five-panel painting, “L’Evidence Eternelle,” is clearly Surreal and works such as the Diebenkorn defy any connection to that movement, many pieces convey a sense of strangeness.

In the case of the Hockney, it’s merely the suggestion that much is going on beneath the surface of a fantastic procession. Jean Delville’s 1892 “Portrait of Madame Stuart Merrill,” on the other hand, is a typically peculiar Symbolist work that depicts a possessed woman with a halo of wild red hair entering a magical state as she rolls her eyes into her forehead.

Corcoran said that her father never changed his mind about an artwork he had purchased and rarely sold pieces from his collection. He was in the news in 1978, however, for the sale of Jasper Johns’ “According to What” to Dominique de Menil. “The painting had become so important that it was always in demand for exhibitions. My father hated to have it off the wall, so he decided to sell it at the end of the Whitney show (a retrospective that toured for more than a year),” Corcoran said.

The family has retained some small artworks and those that were intended as gifts, she said, but all the “major pieces” are up for sale. Sotheby’s May 2 auction also includes 19 Pop artworks from the collection of the late German industrialist Karl Stroher.