AN APPRECIATION : Marcia Weisman: Los Angeles’ First Lady of Art : Art: The advocate and collector was an inspirational force who nurtured the Museum of Contemporary Art into a reality. She died Saturday.

Los Angeles lost one of its most stalwart advocates of contemporary and modern art over the weekend when Marcia Simon Weisman died. Before her death of a stroke, at 73, she had spearheaded so many projects, inspired so many collectors, bought so many artworks and expressed so many opinions about art that she touched nearly everyone in the field.

If you didn’t know her as the visionary behind Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, you heard her appeals to support the museum. If you hadn’t visited her personal art collection in her elegant Beverly Hills home, you knew that she had given the most valuable piece, Jasper Johns’ “Map,” to MOCA.

If you hadn’t enrolled in her art collecting class, you knew her students. If you had missed her exhibition program at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in the ‘70s, you knew about the hospital’s collection of artworks that she gave and solicited from other donors.

“Marcia is the perfect example of what a single individual can accomplish within a community. All we need is a dozen more like her,” MOCA Director Richard Koshalek said.

“She was Mrs. MOCA and Mrs. Art in Los Angeles. She will be dearly missed,” Frederick M. Nicholas, chairman of the museum’s board, said. “She was probably the most influential art person in Los Angeles for many years because of her spirit. Everyone knew her. She was an art celebrity.”

She was also a national figure, said J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery in Washington, where Weisman served on the Collectors Committee. “She had one of the great eyes,” Brown said. “She also had an evangelical sense of teaching people to be aware of the art of our time.”

Weisman is credited with dreaming up and pursuing the notion of a museum of contemporary art in Los Angeles. “She had this idea in the ‘70s and she inspired many people, including me,” said Eli Broad, a fellow founding trustee of MOCA. She also had Mayor Tom Bradley’s ear and persuaded him to provide city land through the Community Redevelopment Agency. Attorney William Norris and Broad joined Weisman’s effort early on, and Broad took charge of raising a $10-million endowment.

“Marcia stirred the pot. Her contributions were her constant advocacy for modern and contemporary art, and her ability to get people together and inspire them with her fondest wish,” Broad said.

In an oral history, taped in 1978 for UCLA, Weisman credits her stepmother, Lucille Michaels Simon, with taking her to museums and awakening a sensitivity to art in her and her brother, Norton Simon, whose renowned collection of Old Masters, Impressionist and Asian art is housed at his museum in Pasadena. Their father, Myer Simon, was a struggling businessman in his early years, but he and his wife later traveled to Europe and furnished their home with antiques and etchings, she recalled.

Among Weisman’s first art purchases, with her husband, Frederick R. Weisman, were contemporary paintings by Ralph Humphries, Adja Yunkers and Paul Brach--all of which she later donated to the Pasadena Art Museum. She had set out to put art on the walls of the couple’s new house, around 1959, and her husband gave her a budget of $2,000. The Weismans subsequently spent millions of dollars on hundreds of modern and contemporary artworks, becoming well known among the nation’s leading collectors.

Their collection was grounded in American Abstract Expressionism, including major works by Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollock, as well as prime examples of Pop art by such artists as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. When they divorced, in 1979, they divided the collection. Frederick R. Weisman continued to collect contemporary art voraciously, while Marcia Weisman built a new collection of works on paper and bought contemporary pieces by young Los Angeles artists.

During the past three decades, Marcia Weisman became a patron of many cultural institutions and a major supporter of the Devereux Foundation, which runs mental health centers. As a constant presence in Los Angeles’ art scene, she mounted campaigns to put contemporary art in government offices, hospitals and residences.

She spread the word to aspiring collectors through classes. She would start at her home and take her students by surprise with three questions about her own collection: Which work do you love? Which one do you hate? Which do you find most challenging? The students would take the same test on their final session, almost invariably giving different answers, Noriko Fujinami, Weisman’s longtime curator, said.

“Marcia really helped a lot of artists by taking her classes to their studios and galleries and encouraging purchases,” Fujinami said. She never told people what to buy, however. “She told them to buy what that liked, what they felt comfortable with,” Fujinami said.

“Many collectors become snobbish. Marcia wasn’t like that. She was a very good teacher,” Broad said.

She was also a generous donor. In addition to her gift of Jasper Johns’ “Map,” she gave MOCA large suites of prints by Barnett Newman and Robert Rauschenberg. She donated “Equipoise,” a 1958 painting by Hans Hofmann, and “Here I (to Marcia),” a 1950 bronze sculpture by Barnett Newman to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. An untitled 1951 painting by Clyfford Still and Ed Ruscha’s 1983 painting “I’ll . . . “ went to the National Gallery in honor of its 50th anniversary this year. The fate of the remainder of her collection has not been determined.

Weisman had a forceful personality and she occasionally offended people with her outspoken style. Some art critics, for example, did not appreciate her arguments against reviews that she believed were damaging, but she was such an essential part of the scene that they took her remarks in stride.

“She did what she did in her idiosyncratic way, but she made people aware of art. There’s a hole without her,” architect Frank Gehry said. “She hooked in people who normally wouldn’t get involved with art, with her enthusiasm and her pushy personality. She wouldn’t give up.”

Weisman was said to drive a hard bargain when buying art. Despite appearances of a luxurious life style, she spent little on herself, said Gehry, who knew her as a friend and a client. When Weisman asked him to build an addition to her house, he wanted to knock the whole thing down and build a structure that would do justice to the collection, but she wouldn’t hear of it. However, when he built the addition on time and under budget, she broadcast his virtues to the world, he said.

Perhaps fittingly, Marcia Weisman died at Cedars Sinai, the hospital she had filled with art. But she left a full calendar. One of the first events she missed was scheduled for Sunday, the day after her death, when the University of Judaism had planned to dedicate a Sol LeWitt sculpture that she had donated.

“I saw her three days before she died and she gave me a check for $50 that she had solicited for the museum. That’s Marcia Weisman,” Nicholas said.