Wilder to Sell a Treasure-Trove of Art : Film Director to Place 94 Works on the Auction Block Nov. 13

Film maker Billy Wilder is cashing in on his collection of contemporary art. The director of such movie favorites as “The Lost Weekend” and “Sunset Boulevard,” nominated for 21 Academy Awards and winner of six Oscars, will put 94 works of art on the block Nov. 13 at Christie’s New York.

Why is he selling?

“The moment comes when you suddenly realize that friends who were collectors have died and the widow, the children and maybe a new husband are having all this fun during an auction. I want to be alive while that auction is going on. I want to get that kick,” the 83-year-old collector said during an interview in his office in Beverly Hills.

Wilder’s kick will come from a sale that is expected to total around $30 million. The roster of works by such artists as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Georges Braque, Joseph Cornell and Fernando Botero includes many relatively small paintings and works on paper, but the quality is high--as are estimated prices.

Picasso’s “Head of a Woman” (1921), a masterful pastel portrait of the artist’s first wife, Olga Koklova, carries the sale’s top estimate of $5 million to $7 million. Four other works are expected to bring between $1 million and $2 million each: Miro’s sprightly 1936 gouache “The Farmer and His Wife,” and a 1927 Miro oil, “L’Etoile”; Alberto Giacometti’s 21-inch-tall bronze nude, “Standing Woman” (1953), and Balthus’ “La Toilette,” a 1957 oil depicting a pubescent nude girl standing beside a bed.

What will Wilder do with his new-found millions? He answers with a Wilderesque anecdote: “A friend of mine who knew I was going to have an auction asked, ‘What are you going to do with all that money?’

“I told him, ‘I ‘m going to buy a submarine and disappear.’ Within two weeks, I got 20 letters saying, ‘Boy do we have a submarine for you.’ Everyboy wants to sell me a submarine.”

More than that Wilder won’t tell, but he cheerfully shares stories about the renowned Hollywood collection that he has built over 50 years.

There’s the tale about Russian author Vladimir Nabokov: “When he came to look at the collection, he was racing through the rooms and nothing, absolutely nothing caught his interest. But when Nabokov got to the bedroom and saw the big nude (clad only in white knee socks and red slippers), he grabbed my hand and said, ‘Balthus.’

“I said, ‘Yes. How did you know?’ He looked at me and suddenly ‘Lolita’ occurred to me, and I said, ‘Never mind.’ ”

Marilyn Monroe, the star of such Wilder films as “The Seven Year Itch” and “Some Like It Hot,” was interested in only one work, a mobile by Alexander Calder, because she and Arthur Miller had lived next door to the sculptor in upstate New York.

Many Hollywood and art world personalities have visited Wilder’s collection, first housed in a large home in Beverly Hills and more recently in a high-rise apartment on Wilshire Boulevard. “It’s a marvelous collection,” said Maurice Tuchman, senior curator of 20th-Century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “Billy doesn’t have a cookie-cutter collection. He’s very much his own man. The work has a rather piquant, literary quality.”

Wilder has lived with art for so long that his decision to sell would seem traumatic, but he appears to have no second thoughts now that the art has been removed from his apartment. “To begin with, it was an absolutely wonderful sensation to see empty walls. I really kind of enjoyed it. But it’s not going to last very long. I’ve got a whole new team sitting on the bench, and a third team after that,” he said, referring to other collections that have been in storage. “There are many things I didn’t put up for auction. I still have my French primitives, my Saul Steinbergs, my African collection, my pre-Columbian things, so you will never know that anything is missing.

“Naturally, you do grow very fond of the things you collect,” he continued. “I would like to know in whose houses they are going to wind up and I would like to give the buyers a little secret advice--this one needs low light, this one needs a little more varnish, when the Schieles are reframed they should be mounted on acid-free ragboard. I hope the buyers will call me and say, ‘What can you tell me about the Botero?’ ”

No sooner did he mention Botero, the Colombian painter of bloated people, than Wilder was off on another story--this one about “Lady in the Tub.” The 1978 painting of a puffed-up nude in a pink bathroom presents the woman from the back as she observes her round face in a hand mirror.

“When they took that Botero away, I looked at it and said, ‘My God, what a waste. Giacometti could have made three (emaciated figures) with that and--here comes the topper--there still would have been enough left over for one small William Morris agent.’ ”

Botero is only one of many artists whom Wilder has bought in quantity. “When my interest latches on to somebody I pursue it,” he said. “That is the whole problem. In order to keep what I have, to keep it on this level, I would have to add something or it’s a dead collection. But I just very simply cannot buy anything in that class because over the last 20 years, two zeros have been added to the prices.”

Wilder, who was born in 1906 in Austria, never had vast amounts of money to spend on art. “I started in Germany in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s as I suppose everybody does, with Toulouse-Lautrec posters,” he said. “But everything had to be given away, because I had to make up my mind in 20 minutes to get the hell out of Berlin (in 1933). I took the night train to Paris, where it was a struggle to feed myself and pay the rent.”

His fortunes began to rise in 1934, when he moved to America. “Whatever I made, $200 or $300 a week, I always put half or a third into a drawer for art purchases. My good luck was in all those years I never bought racing horses, I never had a yacht, I never bought a Ferrari. I have no villa in St. Tropez. I cut down on my ballooning in Bavaria and I stayed away from junk bonds. I just buy nice things and sometimes swap them for better ones. I’ve been rather lucky in that. I bought most of the stuff a couple of weeks ahead of the big prices,” he said.

He’s still at it. His modest office in Beverly Hills has lovely drawings by David Hockney tucked away in spaces between a vast library and movie trophies. His most recent purchases, three works in Zuka’s recreation of the French Revolution that recently appeared at Otis/Parsons art gallery, are still on the road in a traveling show--and it’s a good thing.

“I won’t have to worry about where to hang them for awhile,” he said. “For the first 30 years of marriage, my wife, God bless her, asked me, ‘Where are you going to put it?’ The answer always was--and it finally penetrated--’I don’t know, but I want to have it.’ Sometimes I would drive around with a Picasso drawing or a little Henry Moore sculpture in the trunk of my car and I would have to smuggle it into the house. When I had four Moores, she didn’t notice that suddenly there were five. That was the trick.”

Wilder has bought art all around the world from dealers such as Curt Valentin, Sidney Janis, Frank Perls and Heinz Berggruen. He generally buys established artists for his own collection, but he delights in supporting unknown artists--sometimes buying their work and spreading the word by giving it to friends. “I love to help new talent. That’s one of the joys,” he said.

What about helping the museums that are currently suffering from the high price of art and tax laws that discourage donations?

“I’m not a Getty or a Thyssen. My stuff is good, but it is not quite up to the level of a really first-class museum. They are only going to use it as cash and I think that is very unfair,” Wilder said. “I do not donate because the great museums are going to use my art only for deaccessioning (a standard museum practice of selling pieces from the permanent collection to finance other acquisitions).

“Of the six pieces I gave to the County Museum of Art, only two are now in the permanent collection,” he continued. Citing an instance when he feels he got burned, he said the only notice he had of LACMA’s sale of one of his donated pieces was in the museum’s monthly magazine, which noted the acquisition of a Dutch engraving, purchased with Wilder funds. “When you have a deaccession, don’t you think you should tell the former owner so that he can bid on it and buy it back? That made me very, very angry and I hold it against them,” he said. (Earl A. Powell, director of the museum, was on vacation and unavailable for comment.)

Another problem Wilder has with museums is that they “stash things away” in storage. “When you give to a museum, you want other people to partake in your joy,” he said.

Wilder brightened quickly at the prospect of the auction. “It’s going to be very, very interesting as to where I’m going from here,” he said. The first step is a round of exhibitions of his collection, available for public viewing Sept. 26, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., in the Crystal Ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel. The show will travel on to Toyko, Paris, Zurich and New York.

Then comes Christie’s sale Nov. 13. “I will take my friends to dinner after the auction,” Wilder said. “If it’s a flop they’ll have Coca-Cola, but it’s going to be all right. I would like to see nice people enjoy the art the way I have for 50 years.”