Art, Antiques From Four Failed Thrifts to Be Sold

In one of Southern California’s largest art auctions, nearly 1,000 pieces of fine art and antique furniture with a total appraised value of more than $500,000 will go on the block here Wednesday.

The artwork ranges from a Picasso print to a $40,000 Expressionist painting by Italian-born abstract artist Giorgio Cavallon. It includes about 350 pots and planters, some of them antique and valued at more than $500.

But what’s unique is not what’s for sale, but who is selling it. The auctioneers are not a gallery but federal regulators who are selling some of the booty salvaged from four of the Southland’s failed thrifts--Pacific Savings Bank of Costa Mesa, Sierra Federal Savings & Loan of Beverly Hills, First California Savings Bank in Orange and Westco Savings Bank in Wilmington.

The auction, which will be at the former headquarters of Pacific Savings Bank, serves as a reminder of the reckless investments and poor management that buried many of the nation’s thrifts.

“I don’t see any need for a thrift to pay $40,000 for a painting, unless the thrift has a corner on the art market,” said Thomas S. Ruth, acting director of the Costa Mesa office of the Resolution Trust Corp., the federal agency created last year to manage failed thrifts and oversee their liquidation.

The collapse of hundreds of U.S. thrifts is expected to cost taxpayers more than $500 billion over the next 40 years. Some of the reasons why will be on display Tuesday, when regulators will allow prospective buyers to preview the collection.

It will include expensive pots and planters former Pacific Savings owners bought in such pottery havens as Santa Fe, N.M., and Guadalajara, Mexico. The paintings include some originals such as marine oils by English painter Montague Dawson. The prints include a limited-edition Picasso.

Among the other pieces are an abstract sculpture called “Dancing Bear,” a 19th-Century armoire, French Provincial cupboards, Turkish rugs, three hand-carved wooden horses, a huge wooden jail door and a foot-high geode valued at $1,600. (A geode is a round rock with a cavity lined with inward-growing crystals or layers of silica.)

Ruth said the Cavallon painting was bought for $40,000 by Sierra Federal, whose former chairman, Orin S. Neiman, was an avid art collector.

Ruth said the auction is the government’s first in the Southland to be devoted almost entirely to fine art. A few televisions and stereo components will also be sold.

Jan Bendis, a Tustin auctioneer who will handle the event, said he expects sales to far exceed the those for the artwork at North America Savings & Loan, the failed Santa Ana thrift brought down by insider fraud.

That auction, held in December, 1987, brought in $250,000, he said, but about two-thirds of that was from the sale of furniture, fixtures and equipment such as the oak ceiling-high doors with a remote-control opener. That sale has represented the most money ever collected through the art purchases of a Southland thrift, he said.

Ruth said the furniture, fixtures and equipment of the four thrifts and possibly of other failed S&Ls; will go on auction next, most likely in the fall.