In Search of Time to Promote Artists and Create Collectors

Sigmund Wenger has owned contemporary art galleries for 34 years, the past 5 1/2 of them on La Brea Avenue. But, he says, running a gallery has become a kind of trap for him. At 81, he wants to go on the road to champion struggling artists.

“I need time to travel. I know a few contemporary artists who deserve a lot more exposure than they’re getting. I want to promote them to galleries and museums. You can’t do it by mail; it doesn’t work,” Wenger said. “And I have a client who wants me to go with him to Europe on an art tour. If I can make a good collector out of him, that’s my interest.”

To accommodate these projects, Wenger will move to a smaller gallery space on Robertson Boulevard in February, where he’ll have limited public hours.

“I enjoy organizing shows and dealing with knowledgeable collectors, or people who really want to learn about art. This way, I can pay more attention to them rather than the hoopla of the public gallery scene,” he said. “And with the current economic situation, I have nothing to lose by going into a smaller space.”

He said he expects no appreciable change in the economy in the next two years.

Wenger and his late wife, Muriel, began collecting contemporary art in 1947 while living in Mexico City. “We got into art as a way of life. We had so much fun collecting, we couldn’t understand why others weren’t doing the same. We decided to make it our business,” he recalled.

They opened their first gallery in 1958 in Mexico City, showing the work of contemporary Mexican artists. There, they were also exposed to the work of various European artists.

“Mexico City has great connections with Europe. Its cultural life revolves to a great extent around the embassies. It’s very cosmopolitan and a great cultural center,” he said. “Our cultural vision was broadened by living in Mexico City for 16 years.”

With their experience in Mexican art and their European connections, they moved to San Diego in 1963 and began to deal in art on both sides of the border. They showed the work of Post-World War II Mexican Expressionists; American artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Tobey and Alfred Jensen, and European artists who were not well-known in the United States at the time, such as Arman. They were among the first to bring Gerhard Richter’s art to the United States in 1969.

That year, they also opened a gallery in San Francisco, which their daughter, Lesley, ran for six years. Wenger said it was one of two galleries in the United States that presented ceramic sculpture as fine art rather than craft.

By 1986, Los Angeles had started to become a major art center, and the Wengers’ two children were here, so they moved here and opened the gallery on La Brea. In 1986, theirs was the first American gallery to present the work of Jean-Pierre Raynaud, who has a show coming to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Wenger said highlights included two shows in 1987--Elaine De Kooning’s “Cave Walls” exhibit and a show of Arman’s then-current sculpture and selected works from his previous 25 years--and the gallery’s participation in the Mexican festival last year.

“I started two years ago to prepare for it and revived connections that go back 30 years,” he said. “The museum and gallery scene is great here. Look how they participated in the festival.

“But Los Angeles is not a community where people walk around to browse in galleries. About 88% of my business has been with other galleries and galleries out of town. Of the other 12%, only one-third has been with Angelenos.

“And in the ‘80s, art collecting became too superficial. Some people just wanted to show off their money. When H. W. Janson--who wrote the textbook “History of Art”--retired from New York University as dean of the fine arts department about a decade ago, he explained what the trouble is with the art scene in the United States. He said the schools are churning out thousands of artists, but when they get out of school, what are they going to do? He said we should be teaching people to be collectors.

“My pride is in how many good collectors I’ve made. That’s what I’ve been living for.”

Wenger Gallery, 828 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles. Open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Call (213) 464-4431.

FOUND ART: Gallery director Darrel Couturier thinks that collage has been ignored as an art medium.

“People wonder whether it’s an art form or just throwing things together like we used to do as kids in school, with beads and macaroni,” he said. “Collage is a difficult medium to do successfully. Made from found objects, it’s not just about putting them together, but putting them together in an extraordinary way--and by that I mean out of the ordinary--to make a compelling image. They forget how wonderful it can be.”

“Collage-Montage,” a show of four artists’ varied and inventive notions of collage as art, is on view at the Couturier Gallery. Among the 32 works are Junko Chodos’ new series, “The Compact Universe.” Using photographs and other images, she has created several rhythmically patterned collages and enclosed each one in a compact disc holder.

Maritta Tapanainen takes her images from mechanical manuals and arcane textbooks covering molecular, biological and celestial matter. The collages are open to interpretation. Inspiring them, she says, are concerns of isolation, discovery, fragility and transition.

In his two-dimensional portrait collages, Michael Provart uses abstract forms to compose distinct and compelling images of faces. He also makes portrait collages. With materials such as wood, paper, corrugated cardboard, fabric and paint on board, he creates reliefs that become sculptural.

Michael Madzo’s collages begin with postcard, poster and book-plate images of primarily Renaissance and Baroque paintings. He cuts up the images, reassembles them, paints them and stitches them together with cotton thread, attaching them to a paper backing.

His collages retain the feel of classical portraits and landscapes, despite the novel juxtapositions of body parts, and all kinds of humorous characters and scenes. “The Place to Be,” with its voluminous tableaux, resembles a Rubens landscape run amok. Yet the sum of its parts makes for a singular picture.

“This is Madzo’s own distinct way of suturing art history,” Couturier said.

“Collage-Montage” at Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., through Saturday. Open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, till 9 p.m. Wednesdays. Call (213) 933-5557.