An Often Bypassed Gem : Museums: Timken Art Gallery marks 25 years with its goal still intact: to collect and exhibit high-quality art. Best of all, the museum is free, but it remains undiscovered by many San Diegans.

Unruffled by trends that are changing museums nationwide, the Timken Art Gallery stands firm as a palace guard, blessed with an unusually clear sense of purpose. Its “marching orders,” as the board president calls them, have changed little since the gallery opened 25 years ago this month in the heart of Balboa Park.

While the agendas of other museums have lengthened in recent years to include social and even political responsibilities, collaborations with major corporations and other measures aimed to raise funds and attendance figures, the Timken’s mission can still be stated simply: to collect and exhibit high-quality works of art.

This focus on quality has earned the Timken a reputation of the highest order among art historians and scholars. Grant Holcomb, formerly associate director/curator at the Timken and now director of the University of Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, describes his two years at the Timken in glowing terms.

“It was a true joy--more than any other position I’ve had--working with the sole criterion of excellence,” he said by telephone from Rochester.

But the Timken has also suffered from an ivory tower insularity. Both its board and staff admit that the gallery has done little to draw in the San Diego public--even though admission is free. The roughly 60 European and American paintings and Russian icons in the Timken’s collection are referred to as old friends by art scholars internationally, but to many San Diegans they remain utter strangers.

Even so, the Timken Gallery is celebrating its 25th anniversary year the same way it carries out all of its activities--quietly, slowly, and with class.

The celebration kickoff, according to Nancy Ames Petersen, executive director of the Timken, was the exhibition “Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket,” which ran last spring and featured the gallery’s most popular painting, for which the show was named.

The show was the fourth in a series of “Focus” exhibitions begun by the Timken in 1984. Each show has examined a single work from the museum’s collection, putting it in the company of related, borrowed works and studies. The museum also produced a scholarly catalogue for each show.

This month, the Timken’s board and staff embark on a celebratory trip to London, where they will conduct a regularly scheduled board meeting, and reacquaint themselves with the British dealers and consultants who advise them on their purchases.

The most startling and adventurous of the Timken’s anniversary plans will be unveiled Oct. 26, when the gallery launches a three-part exchange program with the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla. In the program’s first phase, two of the Timken’s 17th-Century paintings--one by Rembrandt, the other by Murillo--will be hung in the La Jolla museum’s galleries, alongside a contemporary work by Odd Nerdrum, a Norwegian painter heavily influenced by the old masters.

In exchange, the La Jolla museum will lend the Timken two of its paintings, a recent acquisition yet to be announced and a work by local artist Robert Glen Ginder. Ginder’s work will hang among the Timken’s Russian icons, which inspired the artist’s style of painting on wood panels with oil and gold leaf.

Sarah Bremser, assistant curator in charge of the project for the La Jolla museum, explained the program’s rationale as an active learning experience.

“The average person approaches the Timken as a chapel,” she said. “They see these wonderful treasures of art history and then they come here and see works of contemporary art and see them as two separate things. This is a wonderful way to bring different audiences together, and to jolt people into thinking in different ways.”

Though the program is modest in scale, it represents “quite a departure for us,” Petersen said. It promises to provide a lesson in the continuity of art, while making unusual bedfellows of the cool, conservative Timken and the more aggressive, adventurous Museum of Contemporary Art.

Less surprising would be a collaboration between the Timken and its neighbor in the park, the San Diego Museum of Art, but a touch of bad blood remains between the two institutions. When the Timken opened its marble-clad, crisply geometric structure in 1965, the gallery’s collection numbered just over 20 paintings. To fill the many bare walls, Petersen said, the Timken borrowed selected works from the Museum of Art.

“My father, Walter Ames (the Timken’s founding director), had a very nice relationship with Warren Beach, the director then of that museum,” she said. “He very willingly lent some of their very strong Spanish works of art to our gallery. The arrangement was that each time we added to the collection, one of theirs went back.

“It wasn’t until the early ‘80s that we finished cleaning that up. We were very grateful to them for the loan, but I don’t think their board was very happy about it. In fact, I’m sure they weren’t happy. It went over almost a 20-year period.”

Regretfully, Petersen said, there isn’t much interchange between the two museums now, except for an overlap in their docent training program, and a recent grant that the Timken awarded to the San Diego museum’s library. But, since it opened, the Timken has shied away from close contact with other institutions.

Over the years, this quirky beginning has given way to a fully idiosyncratic maturity. The gallery is operated unlike any in the country and is funded differently from most.

Walter Ames, an attorney, founded the gallery in 1965 by orchestrating a match between two of his clients, the Putnam sisters, San Diego-based art collectors, and Henry H. Timken Jr. of Ohio, whose family had funded the construction of the San Diego Museum of Art (then the Fine Arts Gallery). Timken paid for most of the new gallery’s construction, and Anne and Amy Putnam provided the paintings to hang inside.

Twenty-five years later, the Ames, Putnam and Timken families remain vital to the gallery’s operation.

Ames was director of the Timken Art Gallery until 1978, when his daughter Nancy took over, with assistance from her son, John, now deputy director. Nancy’s brother, Robert, a San Diego attorney, serves as president of the gallery’s board of directors. A member of the Timken family was formerly a staff member at the gallery, and two other Timkens now serve on the board.

“Having that family connection,” John Petersen said, “we haven’t lost sight of what the original goals and objectives were of the Putnam sisters and the gallery’s founding board of directors. What they envisioned for this place 25 and 30 years ago is what they have today.”

Perhaps even more unusual than the preponderance of family members involved in the Timken’s operation is its dearth of staff trained in art history. Only one member of the gallery’s small staff, the assistant to the director, Gay Nay, has any formal education in art history.

Nevertheless, the Timken occupies a very well-respected niche in the world of art museums because, say its many fans, the staff knows its own limitations.

“John and Nancy have been extremely wise,” Holcomb said. “That wisdom comes from knowing what they can do well and when they need to seek other people.”

From its earliest days, the gallery has maintained a network of friends and consultants around the world that includes many of art history’s top scholars. They advise on potential purchases, coordinate research and publication of the gallery’s catalogues, and, in the case of art conservator David Bull of the National Gallery of Art, help maintain the physical condition of the collection.

Another significant feature that sets the Timken apart from other museums is its financial situation. The gallery’s entire operating budget--$720,000 this year--comes from the income from two trusts, one established by the Putnam sisters, and the other by the Timken family. The gallery receives grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and other agencies for special projects, but collects no city or county funds.

After meeting the gallery’s basic expenses, all excess revenue is channeled into an acquisitions fund. On average, $200,000 to $250,000 goes into the fund each year. The gallery’s policy governing purchases offers only broad guidelines, stating that only “great works of art of established authenticity” and works of “superior quality” will be considered for purchase.

In today’s robust art market, most works appropriate to the Timken’s collection cost upward of $1 million. By pooling its acquisition funds, the Timken staff expects to buy one new work about every five years.

Linking purchases with the sale of lesser works from the collection--such as the Frederic Remington painting “Halt, Dismount!”--has freed the gallery to collect at a brisker pace than expected in recent years, however. In 1984, the Timken purchased an elegant portrait by American painter John Singleton Copley for close to $1.5 million. It acquired Il Guercino’s “The Return of the Prodigal Son” for $480,000 in 1985. Its most recent purchase, in 1986, was a Fitz Hugh Lane seascape, for $1.25 million.

The museum’s reputation and its collection, then, have slowly swelled over the past 25 years to formidable stature and international fame. The gallery and its staff, however, remain small. Of the building’s 7,000 square feet, 5,000 are devoted to exhibition space, leaving little room for offices or storage.

“When this building was designed,” John Petersen said, “they thought we would be caretakers. The collection will hang, someone will come in in the morning and make sure that all the paintings are here, and that person will close the door at night and that’s it. Unfortunately, we have grown beyond that, but we’re still restricted by it.”

Though John Petersen works in what his mother aptly calls “a closet,” expansion is regarded as neither feasible nor desirable by the gallery’s staff and board.

From the beginning, the Timken has been referred to as “a jewel box for the arts,” and a jewel box it will remain--precious and intimate. Its small size is a tremendous advantage, in the eyes of paintings conservator Bull.

“Normally, museums are tough places for people to deal with,” he said. “There are lines and lines of paintings on the wall, they’re vast. The Timken offers such a range of experiences, and yet it’s small. You don’t come away exhausted, you come away uplifted.”

In order to come away at all, however, one must first find the gallery and be seduced enough to enter. Though last year’s attendance reached a peak of 100,000, staff and board alike lament the gallery’s low visibility among San Diegans. (The nearby San Diego Museum of Art, for example, which charges an entry fee of $5, had 705,000 visitors during the fiscal year that ended on June 30.)

“It’s an under-utilized asset in the community,” said board chairman Robert Ames. He estimated that only 10% to 15% of the local population is aware of the gallery’s existence.

The problem is bound to get worse when a set of proposed free-standing arcades is built between the museum and the Prado, Balboa Park’s central pedestrian walkway. Construction on the arcades, meant to restore part of the park’s original architecture, was scheduled to start in August, but has been delayed.

The Timken staff bristles at the mention of the plan, and at its instigators’ purported motives.

“It’s just to hide us,” John Petersen said. The Timken’s architecture is very simple and very modern. The modest, utilitarian building has been criticized because it contrasts with the ornate neo-Baroque Spanish architecture of the rest of the park.

“There is a group here in town,” Nancy Petersen continued, “that just hates the Timken, because of our architecture, and they’ll do everything they can to hide us.”

Already sensitive to the gallery’s low public profile, the Timken staff speaks of the need for marketing and public relations, but only vaguely, without much commitment to promoting it as a tourist attraction.

Musing on the problem of his “jewel box’s” hidden identity, John Petersen landed an appropriate solution.

“We’re really going to have to get the word out that we’re here,” he said. “We’re going to have to make a treasure map.”