A Major Gallery in Humble Surroundings : Art: The Vincent Price Gallery at East Los Angeles College is one of the finest of its kind. But many of the treasures are stored for lack of exhibition space.

It sits like an artistic oasis in a desert of beige institutional buildings, right down the street from a public housing project. Here, in this largely undiscovered exhibition hall, generations of students have viewed their first works by Picasso and Delacroix, and they have gone away touched and inspired.

Quietly, with a big assist from an actor popularly known more for his horror movies than for his art expertise, the Vincent Price Gallery at East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park has amassed one of the finest art collections of any community college in the nation.

“The public of Los Angeles doesn’t know a thing about it,” Price said in an interview from his Beverly Hills home. “It’s never mentioned in the newspapers because I felt, and I think quite rightly, that people would think I was doing something for publicity.”

Instead, the genteel actor and art connoisseur, who started donating to the college after he addressed students there in 1951, has allowed the collection to stand on its own merits.

His initial gift consisted of about 90 rare artworks, including an original 19th-Century print by the French illustrator Honore Daumier, a 16th-Century woodcut by the German master Albrecht Durer, an assortment of African artifacts and some 1,000-year-old pre-Columbian fabrics from Peru.

On prominent display is “The Eyebrow Pencil,” an exquisite 1928 Japanese woodcut by Ito Shinsui, which depicts a delicately drawn woman draped in a loosely fitting blue garment against a solid, tomato-red backdrop. Thomas Silliman, director of the gallery, calls the piece the most important Japanese woodcut of the 20th Century.

The gallery, whose entire collection is donated, also contains original works by Giovanni Piranesi, one of the original modern architecture illustrators, Rufino Tamayo, considered by some the foremost Mexican artist alive today, and Howard Warshaw, an important contemporary American artist.

The idea was to provide a hands-on “study collection” full of works from various schools and types of art, Price said.

“This is something students can actually take and touch and feel and do what they want with,” he said. “Too much art is rarefied. A gallery is meant to serve the community. There isn’t another museum or gallery in our community that does that. Certainly the Getty doesn’t do it.”

Added Silliman: “This is the real thing. And to be turned on by art, you’ve got to see the real thing. A picture in a book in which a painting is reduced to dots on a page can only remind you of what you saw. This is the first time many people have seen this stuff. We have an obligation to turn them on.”

Over the years, the gallery, which charges no admission, has inspired a few people who have gone on to achieve national recognition. One is actor Edward James Olmos, who starred in the TV series “Miami Vice,” the motion picture “Stand and Deliver” and the Broadway play “Zoot Suit.” Olmos said the Vincent Price Gallery was his first real exposure not only to rare artworks but to artistic genius and individual potential.

“It definitely molded and shaped my career,” Olmos said. The years that he spent at East Los Angeles College (1964-66) rank among “the most influential moments of my life, especially having access to the kind of artworks that I was exposed to. It really elevated my awareness. What that gallery has meant to the community in the east part of Los Angeles has been overwhelming. It has created some extraordinary people.”

Now, the collection may be on the brink of moving out of community college obscurity. At a meeting of the gallery’s foundation earlier this month, Allen Bassing, director of the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, said the Smithsonian may agree to jointly sponsor a traveling exhibition of the gallery’s works.

“I think it would be very important for the collection at the gallery to have national exposure,” said Bassing, who was invited to the college by Dean of Instruction Kenneth Hunt. “This is a unique facility. It’s comparable to a collection at a very well-endowed university art gallery. It’s obvious to me that Vincent Price has a real eye for art. He’s able to look at material and separate the dross from the real thing. There are very few people who collect with such an international sphere.”

The gallery now owns approximately 1,500 pieces of art--about three-fourths of it donated by Price--with an estimated value of more than $5 million, Silliman said. Other significant donations have come from Mexican art connoisseurs Stephen Lafer and Bernard Lewin. Lewin is owner of B. Lewin Galleries and a prominent dealer in Mexican art. Screenwriter William Link and rock musician Graham Nash have contributed to the collection as well.

But such acquisition success has its drawbacks. The gallery is now bursting at the seams, unable to display or properly light many of its masterworks. A sampling of the gallery’s finest art hangs in a small, 25-by-25-foot original showroom, and the balance of the vast collection must be stored in the college’s old library stacks, which now serve as a makeshift vault. A newer 50-by-50-foot space, opened in 1986, is used for current shows, but it is lighted by ultraviolet-emitting fluorescent lights that rob paintings of brilliance and slowly fade the original colors to bluish shades.

“The gallery has never been funded properly,” said Silliman, who has taught classes in art appreciation and display techniques, in addition to his gallery duties, since arriving in 1957 while still a UCLA graduate student. “It’s always been out of my pocket or somebody else’s pocket.”

“We’re very concerned about the lack of ability to support the gallery at a higher level,” said Omero Suarez, East Los Angeles College president. “It’s a tremendous showpiece, a jewel in East L.A., and we need to expose it more to our community. We need a new facility; we need to upgrade the building that houses it, but the resources are not available.”

Indeed, funding was spread so thin after passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 that the gallery was forced to close in 1979 for a year. The college administration budgeted $11,400 for the gallery this year--the first such appropriation since Proposition 13, Silliman said. The college, which has about 14,000 students, has a budget of $18 million this year.

To protect the collection and help raise money for a new building, the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees last June established the Vincent Price Art Gallery Foundation, said Wallace Albertson, chairwoman of the new foundation and former president of the community college board of trustees. Albertson said one of the foundation’s first priorities is to put together a brochure and cover letter from Price to send to potential supporters. The other is to solve the lighting problem in the showroom.

“We see this collection as being not only a resource to this campus but to the other eight campuses in the Los Angeles Community College District. There have been cooperative showings with other institutions, but nothing as major as there could be if we really get our act together and get organized,” said Albertson, widow of actor Jack Albertson.

A jointly sponsored traveling exhibition, such as one with the Smithsonian, could generate rental fees from participating museums and galleries around the country, said Hunt, the dean of instruction.

Even on a shoestring budget, the gallery has racked up a number of achievements. In 1981, it sponsored the first show by Mexican artist Tamayo in the United States, Silliman said. The gallery co-sponsored the first state-funded Chicano art exhibit in 1975, and in 1968 it was the first gallery or museum in the nation to show cinema as an art form, he said.

The gallery, as part of an ongoing series of one-man shows titled “Coming Home Again,” plans to feature the art of East Los Angeles College alumni, including Gilbert Lujan, Kent Twitchell and Gronk, who have become accomplished artists. Last semester, the gallery staged a retrospective of works by alumnus George Yepes, the artist known for his cover of the Los Lobos album, “La Pistola y El Corazon,” and his darkly passionate and dreamlike interpretations of such primal themes as death, lust, decadence and pride.

The gallery’s most popular shows have attracted more than 25,000 visitors from the college and surrounding community during the exhibits’ four- to six-week runs, Silliman said.

And, inevitably, some puzzle over the Vincent Price connection.

“When I first came here in 1957, my first comment was, ‘What is Vincent Price doing with an art collection in a dump like this?’ ” Silliman said. “And it still applies. But the question is the answer: It’s really needed here. That’s been my whole cause, and Mr. Price’s too--accessibility to art. If it’s not at the community colleges, then Jesus God, where is it going to be? There’s still a kind of barrier. Art museums tend to be elitist. It’s the fur coats who get invited to the openings.”

Price’s introduction to the college came when he was invited to speak there in 1951 about “the aesthetic responsibility of the citizen.” Challenged by the art department chairman to initiate a collection there, he and his then-wife did so because they were impressed by students’ interest “in something as foreign and as far away from the necessities of life to them as art,” Price said.

His affection was cemented a few years later after several works of art were stolen out of a storage closet. The art department posted a sign reading: “Mr. and Mrs. Price gave this collection for all the students.”

The thief returned the art.

“That,” Price said, “endeared me forever to it.”

* THE VINCENT PRICE GALLERY

The Vincent Price Gallery is located on the campus of East Los Angeles College, 1301 Brooklyn Ave., Monterey Park. Its next show, “Some of Our Favorite Things,” featuring masterworks from the gallery’s collection, will open Feb. 20. During the exhibition, the gallery’s hours are noon to 3 p.m., Monday to Friday, other times by appointment. The phone number is (213) 265-8841. Admission is free.