Collector Savors Bad Taste of His ‘Last Suppers’

Delmore E. Scott makes no apologies for his lousy art collection.

The former Moorpark College instructor and Thousand Oaks resident has had four decades to amass 475 commercial and kitschy reproductions of “The Last Supper.”

He believes that it’s the largest exhibit of its kind.

Housed at the Conejo Valley Art Museum in Thousand Oaks, Scott’s exhibit is a tribute to his favorite painter, Leonardo da Vinci.

While the original “The Last Supper” is in a monastery in Milan, Italy, some of Scott’s reproductions, on everything from electric clocks to plastic rulers, seem more worthy of Woolworth’s.

“It’s in galloping bad taste,” the silver-haired instructor said. “One of the miracles to me is that they were made.”

On Wednesday, Scott will host a 540th birthday party for da Vinci at the museum. Before the show opened last month, Scott said he was worried that he might offend religious art lovers. But they have been the first to laugh, he said.

“This is not a politically correct exhibition,” he said. “But in this day and age, I don’t know how you can have a politically correct one.”

There are bas-reliefs in brown plastic, and lacquered, burled wood, the kind of creative genius only a street vendor can appreciate. All of them depict Jesus Christ, or a substitute, with his disciples.

Take the Watergate Supper, No. 37, titled “The Missing 18 Minutes.”

It depicts Richard M. Nixon as the Christ figure flanked by 12 cronies, including John Dean, Bob Haldeman and G. Gordon Liddy. John Erlichman sits in Judas’ position at the table, under which is tucked a hidden microphone. Martha Mitchell is using a pay phone in the background.

“That’s really funny,” chuckled Alice Rishoff of Thousand Oaks on a recent visit to the museum as she stopped to appreciate Nixon’s dour demeanor.

LaDonna Breneman of Thousand Oaks, another visitor, said she was surrounded by religious figures while being raised as a Catholic, but was awed by the amount and variety of Last Suppers.

“I’ve never seen that many of them before,” she said.

An avid lecturer on art history and popular culture, Scott, 68, likes to accompany visitors on a guided tour of his collection. He taught art history for 35 years before retiring four years ago from Moorpark College.

Some of the pieces in his exhibit were salvaged by friends from garage sales and thrift stores. The most expensive piece probably cost about $100, the cheapest about 25 cents, he tells visitors.

One of Scott’s favorites is his first Last Supper portrait, a gilded frame plucked from his mother’s storage closet decades ago. Fuchsia pink roses, candles and a tiny book of the Ten Commandments adorn this version.

He began collecting burled wood versions during road trips on Route 66, he said. Then 20 years ago, while poring over his collection with students, he realized that he had assembled 85 pieces over the years.

After he moved from Los Angeles to the Conejo Valley, the collection languished for years in boxes in his bedroom and garage. When his current exhibit ends, most of the pieces will return to the dusty old boxes and probably will go back into his garage.

“I don’t know whether the old bird had a sense of humor,” he said, referring to da Vinci. “But if he could come back now with total awareness of everything that happened in the last 500 years, I think he would enjoy it.”

And if the collection has not earned him fame, at least it has won him some friends. He pointed to a limerick penned by Frieda K. Fall, a friend who works at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

There was a professor named Scott,

Who collected da Vinci a lot.

He could find “The Last Supper”

In wares just like Tupper,

Or simply by stirring the pot.