A Couple’s Enthusiasm in Art Reflects California : The Museum of Art will feature the collection of Jim and Linda Ries in its first major exhibit of state paintings since 1984

Most of the time, Jim and Linda Ries live among their exquisite collection of California paintings.

But for months now the walls of their Encino home have been uncharacteristically bare.

Ordinarily, a monumental painting of Mont Blanc by Edgar Alwyn Payne hangs over the fireplace in the living room, its creams and violets reflected in the mirrored wall that faces it.

But Payne’s “The Great White Peak (No. 2)” is now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, awaiting the opening Thursday of an exhibit titled “A Time and Place: From the Ries Collection of California Painting.” The show comes to the Museum of Art from the Oakland Museum, where it was organized by senior curator Harvey L. Jones.

It is the Museum of Art’s first major exhibit of California paintings since 1984.

A private collection of unusual variety and quality, the 60 pictures in the exhibit illustrate the remarkable range of California painting during the first half of the 20th Century, from the impressionist landscapes of Granville Richard Seymour Redmond and Elmer Wachtel to later regionalist and modernist works. As curator Jones points out, the exhibit chronicles changes that took place both in the art of California and in the state itself. Images of pristine California are included, but so are icons of urbanized California such as Edward Biberman’s painting of the Sepulveda Dam.

Until a decade ago, the Rieses collected not paintings but scrimshaw and whaling artifacts. But that was really his passion, and the couple wanted to find an enthusiasm they could share.

The first California painting they bought was Alson Skinner Clark’s “The Weekend, Mission Beach.” They saw a picture of the moody, minimalist beachscape, painted in 1924, in Ruth Lily Westphal’s pioneering book on the Southland’s plein-air painters, who set up their easels outdoors and raced to finish their paintings before the light failed.

Jim called Jean Stern of the now defunct Peterson Gallery in Beverly Hills to inquire about the painting. Stern, who happened to be representing Clark’s estate, told Ries: “I’m looking at it right now.”

“We took three months to buy our first painting,” says Jim, 52, an attorney with a private practice, specializing in commercial real estate. “Every Saturday we’d schlep over there and sit and look at that painting.” The Rieses knew from the start that they wanted pictures that would hold up to constant scrutiny in their home--a requirement collectors for museums needn’t worry about.

They are not impetuous buyers. “We need time to make up our mind,” says Linda, who volunteers as a docent at the Museum of Art. “Paintings take time to reveal their essence. We like to see things in our home, which is why we haven’t purchased much at auction. You have to stand on one leg, right?”

When the Rieses began, few people were collecting the work of the California artists of 1900 to 1950. As Scot Levitt, of the auction house of Butterfield & Butterfield, explains, interest in Edgar Alwyn Payne, Guy Rose and the other California impressionists--still the most collected painters of the period--began to surge less than 10 years ago.

A specialist in California paintings, Levitt believes that one reason for their renewed popularity (they had been fashionable in the 1920s) was the astronomical prices that works by Van Gogh and some other European impressionists were commanding.

“People began to realize that, as impressionist paintings, they were very undervalued,” Levitt says. Since the early 1980s, the price of a major painting by Rose, who was born in the San Gabriel Valley and returned there after living in Monet’s village of Giverny, France, has risen from less than $10,000 to “$100,000 plus,” he says. Levitt adds that good California paintings from those first three decades “are already getting very hard to find.”

Besides appealing to the Rieses, California paintings met their criterion that whatever they collected be available locally. “We didn’t want to buy strictly from the East Coast,” says Jim, who had become disenchanted with frequent trips East to find scrimshaw. This wasn’t just a matter of convenience and cost, he says. The Rieses wanted to establish a “favored collector” relationship with a nearby dealer, one who understood their taste and would think of them first when a choice work became available. They found such a person in Encino art dealer George Stern.

“We also like California,” Linda says. Better yet, they know California. Their visual knowledge of California helps them evaluate and “validate” works, they said. “We know what the coast of Laguna looks like, we know what the hills of California look like, we know what it’s like on a hazy day here,” Jim says.

Sometimes their well-honed sense of visual geography has a dramatic payoff. When they bought Guy Rose’s 1916 “Lifting Fog,” experts thought it depicted the Carmel coast. But the Rieses realized that the cactus in the right-hand corner could only have grown farther south. They went in search of the actual site and found it south of Laguna Beach.

On a daily basis, their firsthand knowledge of the rich greens of the local mountains after the winter rains heightens their appreciation of, say, William Wendt’s artistic treatment of that subject matter. “In turn,” Linda says, “the paintings sensitize you to your surroundings. You look at everything in a different way.”

The Rieses buy only those paintings they agree on. That’s one of their ground rules. For them, one of the pleasures of collecting is the intellectual one of articulating their responses to a particular work. Usually, their feelings converge, so much so that they both casually refer to “our eye.” When they don’t agree, Linda says, “We lobby each other.”

Jim says he and Linda “like to think we collect paintings, not artists.” When visiting museums and galleries, they try to evaluate the work independently of the artist and his or her reputation. They try to forget the signature on a painting, even a highly acclaimed one, and ask themselves if they would buy it if they could. “It’s amazing the number of paintings to which you’d say, ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ ” he says.

“The best paintings are ultimately those that have a continuing sense of mystery about them,” he says. “We used to play a game--we don’t play it so much anymore. It was called The House Is Burning Down. The house is burning down and, besides the kids, you can grab five paintings. Our goal has been to buy paintings that were one of the five.”

The Rieses, who have two children, decline to say which five paintings they would reach for first, but Jim says one would surely be Fletcher Martin’s “A Lad From the Fleet,” the masterful 1935 portrait of a boxer by one of the great practitioners of the American Scene style. Other esteemed and frequently exhibited works in the collection include Armin Carl Hansen’s “The Farm House,” painted about 1916, Douglass Ewell Parshall’s “Three Horses” (circa 1930), and David Park’s “Dancing Couples” from 1935-1937.

The collection is always evolving. Linda describes it as “an organic entity.” Instead of adding pictures ad infinitum, the Rieses decided to limit the collection to about 50 works. As a result, while they are always looking at new paintings, they usually won’t buy one without giving up something they already have. They estimate that they have liked at least 500 paintings well enough to bring them home to see how they wore.

In the course of a decade, their taste has inevitably taken new turns. In a sense, Jim says, the exhibit reflects not their present aesthetic position, but their vision of four years ago, when they began working with Jones to mount the show. Some of the plein-air paintings, portraits and flower-filled still lifes that so captivated them when they began collecting are now less interesting to them than paintings, including non-representational works, that require a more educated appreciation. Their taste is broad enough to include amusing, working-class paintings from the Depression and more recent, surrealist-tinged works. Within the broad category of California paintings, there are dozens of ways that their future collecting could go, they say.

The Rieses collect together. The process of reaching the pre-acquisition consensus they require has become an integral part of their shared lives. Collecting isn’t Art as Marriage Encounter, by any means, but “it is something that has been a very, very important part of our relationship,” Linda says.

While they may share “an eye,” they bring individual strengths to the process. Jim is the principal researcher, digging up information on artists and their times, not always easy given the relative paucity of written material about California art. Linda’s forte is her independent aesthetic sense. She has lobbied hard for some of the happy surprises in the collection, such as Dorr Bothwell’s “We Sleep With Our Heads at the Foot of Our Four-Footed Bed,” a haunting 1940 work, based on a dream. Linda also immediately spotted the power of the Payne painting of Mont Blanc, which the Rieses have promised to the Museum of Art.

As the Rieses’ collection has grown, first-rate California paintings of the past have become harder to find--and dearer to own. But they say they will continue to seek works full of the mysterious power that distinguishes a masterwork from an ordinary picture.

“Collecting is an addiction,” Jim says. “It’s an addiction to intellectual stimulation and to new aesthetic experience.”

Besides, one of the five paintings the Rieses would grab if the house were on fire might still be out there, waiting.

“A Time and Place: From the Ries Collection of California Painting” opens Thursday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. The exhibit continues through July 7. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Admission: $5 for adults, $3.50 for students and seniors with I.D., and $1 for children ages 6 through 17. Information: (213) 857-6000.