Art Collector Brings Culture Home

Twenty years ago an art historian’s illness changed Gene L. Isaacson’s life.

“They handed me an assistant professorship and asked me to take his place on Chapman College’s (World Campus Afloat) cruise,” said the Rancho Santiago College instructor.

The trip opened his eyes to new cultures and new people, and most of all, to their art.

Today he has a major collection of contemporary and tribal art in wood, metal and fabric from Africa, the Pacific islands, Mexico and South America.

“I got my heart into it on that first cruise,” said Isaacson, whose imaginatively remodeled home in Huntington Beach is a gallery for the collection.

A waterfall in his enclosed front yard is a dazzling greeting to visitors.

He said that, for him, art collecting “grew from a mild interest, to a passion to an incurable disease.”

His collection, part of it in storage and in a second home, includes three original Picassos and 300 African art pieces that span 2,500 years. Among the primitive pieces are colorful African masks and the tools with which they’re made.

The collection is chronicled in the Smithsonian Institution’s book, “African Art in Private American Collections.”

His collection, believed to be the largest of about a dozen in Orange County, was financed with what he said were good real estate investments.

He regularly shows his collection at home--frequently to his art classes from the Santa Ana college campus--and exhibits and discusses the works with grade-school students as well.

He also allows organizations to have fund-raising parties in his home, which has artwork even in the kitchen.

Even though Isaacson, who is single, said that his art “crowds my life at home,” he added: “I wake up and get a daily high (from the artwork) with no aftereffects.”

Isaacson just returned from a three-day visit to Augsburg College in Minneapolis in advance of an exhibit there of his mask collection.

“If people open their eyes to art and receive whatever the content of that art has to offer, they get a spiritual enrichment,” said Isaacson, who also teaches art classes in the evening at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.

Those are heady words from the former North Dakota farm child who said that he had “zero exposure to art” while growing up and was ready for a life working the fields.

But the academic world got his attention. He graduated with art and music degrees from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., and did graduate work in Rome and Vienna.

“Art isn’t just an aesthetic experience. It’s a historical thing,” he said. “You read about the people who made the art so you can understand it all. At first it’s like a foreign language. You don’t understand it until you study it.”

Anyone studying tribal and primitive art, he said, will quickly realize that “you don’t get fine, primitive art from the countries that once made it.”

“The artwork just isn’t being made any more, and what was made is in private collections and museums. Today, all you can buy in those countries are tourist souvenirs.

“Collectors like myself who want to zero in on fine quality art have to go to auction houses in Europe,” he said. “There is very little in the United States, and what is here is financially prohibitive.”

There’s a definite trend at the Anaheim Central Library or any of its branches.

During the past eight years, according to Kevin Moore, central library manager, 15 full-time workers gave birth to boys.

She said some employees suspect the water. Others call it the “Library Curse.”

Moore said that she advises her female employees to drink bottled water if they want a girl.

Acknowledgments--Jane Lindsey, 68, who played the violin for her talent segment, was named Ms. Senior America of California over a field of 20 other contestants who competed in the pageant recently at the Grand Hotel in Anaheim. The Santa Ana resident will now compete in April in Atlantic City for the national title.