COMMENTARY : Will Weisman Gift Work Wonders in San Diego? : Art: Lackluster museum has an enviable opportunity to build on a new foundation of important California works.

If Walter Annenberg were to donate his exceptional collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where they are on temporary display through Sunday, the gift would instantaneously transform the museum’s holdings. Overnight, a respectable museum collection would become an internationally prominent repository for late European painting.

By stark contrast, a similar gift to, say, the Metropolitan Museum, the Philadelphia Museum, the National Gallery or any other art-rich repository wouldn’t have anywhere near the same impact. All of those institutions would likely appreciate the magnanimous windfall, and all of them could make good use of the paintings. But, at any one of them, the gift would rank as just one among many important private assemblies donated over the years. The Annenberg collection would be readily absorbed into an already substantive pool of Western art.

Precisely where a private collection goes public is, in the end, as important as the fact that it’s going public at all. Such gifts to museums can have strategic purposes--and ultimately should have, if the greatest public benefit is to be served. The abundant fruits of a private collector’s labors can give clarity and focus to an otherwise shapeless public repository, or provide much-needed depth to an assembly of art that only skims the surface. And a transformative donation like that can yield results that will profoundly affect an institution far into the future.

Evidence of the sudden, sharp difference that can be made by strategic placement came not long ago from the surprise announcement that the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation has given a significant group of 33 paintings and sculptures by several prominent Californians to the San Diego Museum of Art. The scale of the gift is certainly far less exalted and dramatic than an Annenberg benefaction would be. But the principle is the same. In the context of the San Diego Museum, where officials are now busily planning the spring debut of the Weisman gift, it could have far-reaching implications.

News of the Weisman donation came as a surprise because, several months ago, when rumors began to circulate that a gift to an unspecified California museum was in the works, a host of institutions seemed likely candidates. The San Diego Museum of Art, safe to say, was not high on any observer’s list. Of the state’s numerous museums, it is hardly one that has distinguished itself either in the brilliance of its collections or the sustained verve of its programming.

The exhibition program has been generally tepid. Exhibitions tend toward the popular or the pleasantly benign, such as last year’s displays of Faberge eggs and of the Spanish Impressionist Joaquin Sorolla, or the 1988 Cecil Beaton showcase. A real eye-opener hasn’t occupied the special exhibition galleries for a very long time (the last was no doubt the 1986 touring retrospective of Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer). And in the past decade, the museum itself has organized few shows of note, relying instead on packaged exhibitions from elsewhere.

As for art made in California, the most recent substantive effort was a sprawling survey of sculpture mounted 10 years ago, in the summer of 1980.

Like most provincial museums in the United States, the San Diego Museum boasts a collection long on minor art by major names, of quaint workshop pictures from otherwise notable European schools, and of once fashionable decorative objects that, commonly, find their way into public collections as a result of travels to exotic locales by distinguished pillars of local society. If it’s lucky, a provincial collection is given spice by an item or two of unusual merit--the kind of thing that becomes a magnet for cognoscenti, like an art-world trademark. The chief example at the nearly 70-year-old institution in Balboa Park is the odd, startlingly modern, meditative still life, “Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber,” painted around 1602 by a Carthusian monk, Juan Sanchez Cotan. One among a small but respectable group of Spanish Baroque pictures, it’s the justifiably acclaimed standout in the museum’s collection and one of the great paintings of its kind.

More to the point of the Weisman gift, the museum’s assembly of 20th-Century art is, save for isolated examples, negligible, and its holdings in contemporary art made in California exceedingly thin. On a recent visit, a scant three works by Californians were on view: unimpressive 1980s figurative sculptures by Manuel Neri and Deborah Butterfield (a San Diego native) and Wayne Thiebaud’s small 1962 painting “Caged Pie.”

There is admitted irony to the choice of an institution unable to claim a track record of conspicuous excellence as recipient of a $1.5-million gift of paintings and sculptures. This is especially true in light of the proximity of other museums that can indeed make such claims--most obviously, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in nearby La Jolla, the Newport Harbor Art Museum up the road a piece or even the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Right about now those outposts must be wondering if a languid, relatively disengaged program is in fact the hidden road to success with benefactors.

And yet, the gift to the San Diego Museum of Art does make strategic sense. In one stroke, the Weisman donation elevates contemporary California art to the status of a significant focus for the collection--likely the only focus with the capacity to develop substantively in the future. That factor may have played a part in the willingness of the museum, apparently alone among its rivals for the Weisman holdings, to set aside permanent exhibition space solely for California art.

Roughly half of the gift is composed of works that any museum would be eager to have. Aside from a terrific 1962 assemblage-sculpture by Bruce Connor, who works in the Bay Area, it principally includes art by Southern Californians: John McLaughlin, John Altoon, Craig Kauffman, Ron Davis, Robert Irwin, Edward Ruscha and John Baldessari, as well as the younger artists Alexis Smith, Matt Mullican and Tim Ebner. Clearly, the assembly leaves considerable room for development in several areas, should the museum decide to concentrate on filling out a representative display of art made in California since the 1960s.

That effort would be worthwhile. With cleverness and skill, the San Diego Museum of Art could transform itself into something rather common in Europe but quite rare in the United States: a museum located outside the central art capitals, but one that gains enviable significance as a repository for the art of the region.

In short, the gift means that a museum that has always lacked a strong artistic identity is suddenly within reach of one. The absence of a strong identity, which is not a problem for La Jolla, Newport or MOCA, is the paradoxical ingredient that seems to have made the San Diego Museum of Art the perfect strategic choice. Whether the museum will, through future acquisitions and exhibition programs in the field of contemporary California art, refine and sharpen that profile with diligence and vigor remains to be seen. Yet for the institution and its community, the Weisman donation has offered both art and a golden opportunity.