Putting a Spotlight on California Art : Gift: A Los Angeles art collector selected the San Deigo Museum of Art for his gift of 33 artworks because the museum will devote a gallery to contemporary California art.

Sitting in a hotel suite in downtown San Diego, Los Angeles art collector and patron Frederick R. Weisman looked out at the city’s urban skyline, backed by a resplendent view of the bay.

“It’s a beautiful city with a wonderful climate,” he said. “The second largest in California, sixth largest in the country.”

Weisman seemed pleased, as if at a new discovery. Here to personally announce his $1.5-million gift of 33 contemporary California artworks to the San Diego Museum of Art, Weisman appeared reassured that his collection will have a proper home when it arrives here next March.

Speaking thoughtfully, the 78-year-old man who’s done business internationally for a lifetime appeared surprised at San Diego’s recent growth. This is not a city he has visited often in recent years. It is not a city to which he has previously had strong ties.

Indeed, San Diego was not the obvious home for even this small portion of Weisman’s holdings, which number around 2,000 works of art. Yet this is the collector’s largest gift of artworks to date. And when the museum and the Frederick R. Weisman foundation director, Henry Hopkins, first announced the gift last month, Hopkins said the response he heard most from the art world came as a question: “Why San Diego?”

“It doesn’t have a history of contemporary art involvement,” Hopkins said, referring to the small size of the museum’s contemporary art holdings. In fact, the museum has purchased just two major contemporary works during the past three years.

“San Diego didn’t have a lot of California art due to conservatism and because the museum never had a lot of money,” Hopkins said.

“We said, ‘What better place?’ ”

But Weisman’s strong ties to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he serves on the board of trustees, made others question his gift to a museum little more than a hundred miles south. In fact, Weisman said he also considered donating the same 33 California works to the Los Angeles museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Crocker Museum in Sacramento.

What San Diego offered was the willingness to accommodate Weisman. The museum will devote a gallery to California works, exhibiting the 33 Weisman works as well as other purchases and donations in keeping with the spirit of the collection.

Other museums had not agreed to that condition, Weisman said. Earl A. Powell II, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, proposed integrating Weisman’s gift into the rest of the museum’s contemporary holdings.

“They’ve got California art, but it’s on different floors and in different rooms. We wanted it together,” said Weisman.

Other museums, such as the Newport Harbor Art Museum and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, were considered as well, Hopkins said, but like the Los Angeles museum, their holdings in contemporary California art are shown in conjunction with international artworks.

At the Balboa Park museum, the installation will be specialized and will stand out, Weisman and Hopkins predict.

“This wonderful museum is going to be the museum in the state of California where a spectator can come in and see California art in one place, one location,” Weisman said. “Not a couple in this room and a couple on another floor.”

It was the concentration of a California collection that was most important to Weisman, not an obligation for the museum to retain the works he donated, a condition most collectors seek. “We want this to be a vital collection, an up-to-date collection for the next 50 years and so on,” Weisman said.

“If the directors feel there’s California art that should be in the collection and they have works they want to sell, they can do so. What’s important is you’ll walk in there and see California art.”

Weisman also said that he plans to have a continuing relationship with the museum, and Hopkins will oversee any new acquisitions that may be made if works from the collection are sold.

He said he has set up similarly specialized collections at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the University of Minnesota, in each case donating works from the same state as the institution.

Weisman said he feels a “corporate responsibility” to share his artworks. And he likes to have them visible. A condition of the San Diego gift is that a major portion of the collection remain on view at all times.

“I hate to see things in storage. I like to see things, I like to share things. And if I can’t see them, I want other people to be able to see them.”