ART / Cathy Curtis : ‘O.C. Collects’ Paints Portrait of Collectors

Diane and Igal Silber know when they’ve come upon a work of art they both want to buy.

“We look at a piece, look at each other, and smile,” says Igal Silver.

The quote appears in a wall label in “Orange County Collects,” a sprightly, unpretentious show at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton (through June 25). Rather than attempting to show the “best” art collected locally, the exhibit simply offers a trio of pieces from each of 18 private, corporate and museum collections representing vastly different sensibilities and budgets.

Thumbnail sketches of the collectors printed on extended wall labels--along with a few disarmingly candid quotes--help the viewer visualize what sort of people they are and what art means to them. Happily, the financial side of collecting--which, in recent years, has come to dominate the general public’s perception of art--is not emphasized here.

Some well-known artists from several eras and locales are represented in the exhibit, mostly with lesser or smaller-scale work: Fernand Leger, John McLaughlin, Ed Kienholz, Jonathan Borofsky, Billy Al Bengston, Thomas Hill, Claes Oldenburg, Marc Chagall. But the charm of the show lies in juxtapositions and discoveries that may or may not be linked with a famous name.

Stuart and Lori Katz’s collection yields a vintage Kienholz (“Sawdy,” from the “Five-Card Stud Series”)--a real car door with a mirrored window and an attached license plate that reads “SAWDY 34,” and Oldenburg’s smooth black cast-resin sculpture in the shape of an upside-down letter Q, which looks amusingly like a plump seal. The quirky surprise is a painting by June Leaf of a nude woman wryly scrutinizing herself in a hand mirror as she stands on a table in a nearly bare room.

Among the paintings loaned by the Bowers Museum, we’d expect to find the unremarkable plein air coastal scenes by Edgar Alwin Payne and William Granville Smith. But how startling to see a painting by Ed Kienholz before--well, before he became the Kienholz with an internationally recognizable signature style. (The date is listed only as “after 1953,” the year he was 26 and moved to Los Angeles from the state of Washington.)

Called “Point Pink,” the work presents a group of large, red, irregular shapes like a tableful of rocks, seen from above. Like the Laguna Art Museum’s painting by a young Robert Irwin (not in this exhibit), the piece reminds us that even the most highly imaginative artists go through a process of trial, error and imitation until they develop a point of view that is theirs alone.

In 1964, E. Gene Crain began his 1,000-piece collection of conservative, also-ran Southern California artists with a watercolor by Rex Brandt. Crain set about gathering information about their work and has maintained friendships with most of them. He says frankly that he collected these paintings “not because (they were) necessarily beautiful . . . not because (they were) necessarily important,” but because they document a “terribly vigorous and vital” era.

The integrity behind this point of view, unfashionable though it may be, seems to give the works on view an added luster. Millard Owen Sheets’ “Old Mill Big Sur” from 1933, in particular, comes across with a fine, brooding strength, a study in Old World Expressionism as diffused through the down-to-earth terms of an American regional style.

Works from Security Pacific Corp., which is opening a gallery in Costa Mesa next month, herald the presence of one of the major corporate collections in the region. Los Angeles artist Marc Pally’s “Deal” is a particular treat: a fine small piece by the young Los Angeles artist who mingles various kinds of vegetative imagery in enigmatic ways.

To be sure, a few of the selections suggest that the collections they came from must be rather lackluster and unadventurous. But the show’s determined emphasis on the personalities of collectors seems calculated to disarm niggling criticisms. Surely people have a right to gather around them whatever makes them happy.

But the exhibit itself would have benefited from background information on the lesser-known artists as well as specific remarks by the collectors on the work chosen for the exhibit. Why do they like this particular artist, we want to know, and what was it about this particular work that made them want to live with it?

Mingling private holdings with the museum variety is a trifle awkward in this context. Not in terms of the art--which seems, on the whole, to represent the most accessible portions of the collections--but because the written material doesn’t give us a sense of the great game of curatorial pursuit and capture of art.

It should be said, too, that the center’s small, awkwardly shaped galleries don’t show off the works in their best light. Too often, one piece pokes its way into your peripheral vision while you look at the next one.

On a more picayune note, it seems overly coy of the private collectors to keep their hometowns a secret. We don’t expect to read their street addresses, but we wonder where in Orange County they live. But most curious of all was the corporate collection that decided to remain anonymous. Their taste in landscapes seems so utterly bland as to be blameless in all save serious art circles.

“Orange County Collects” remains through June 25 at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave., Fullerton. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 738-6595.