LEGACY : Artist’s Legacy Winds Up in Warehouses

Jan de Swart paid little heed to the mainstream art world during his long and creative life. The Dutch emigre and artist preferred the solitude of Allegro, his hilltop home, where he could sculpt undisturbed.

From his workshop marched 60-foot, undulating wood sculptures, Dada-esque mobiles, surreal plastic toys, found-art assemblages and whimsical furniture.

Critics struggling to describe it listed influences from Brancusi, Arp, Miro, Picasso and Noguchi.

Ultimately, however, Jan de Swart forged a singular style all his own.

In 1986, a year before his death, the Laguna Art Museum mounted a retrospective of De Swart’s works that received favorable critical reviews. Then in 1990, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art included several of De Swart’s architectural models in “Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses.”

De Swart died too late to enjoy his last success. His widow, Ursula, followed him four years later.

When the artist’s 45-year-old son Jock de Swart came to Allegro recently to sort through his parents’ belongings, he found photo archives, a 500-page memoir by his mother and, most important, thousands of uncatalogued works by his father.

But those works--so familiar from his childhood--haunt Jock de Swart today. He knows that unless a home is found for the collection, his father’s legacy will be lost.

Now, most of the pieces are stored in public warehouses, far from public view. De Swart, a Palms architect, says he has neither the space nor the means to store his father’s art indefinitely.

“What I would really love is if the best pieces went to different museums all over the country,” he says wistfully. “They wouldn’t have to buy it. They would just have to show it. It’s a unique contribution to the world that should be available to people.”

The architect says he receives about 20 calls a month from people wanting to know what has happened to his father’s collection. One wealthy collector even offered to buy it all and put it “in a safe place.” But De Swart demurred, still hopeful that the art can find a more public home.

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Curators say Jock de Swart’s dilemma is only too common for the survivors of artists who achieved only marginal fame in their lifetimes. Without a museum, or art critic, to champion the artist’s body of work, his or her tenuous reputation could slowly dissolve, making it difficult for future generations to reassess that artist’s contributions within a historical framework.

Experts familiar with Jan de Swart say that, while his works lack the stature and towering influence of other sculptors, he was an important regional figure whose contributions to 20th-Century American art should be reconsidered.

Jan de Swart “had a very unique vision and his work had a great deal of integrity,” says Elizabeth Smith, the MOCA curator who included De Swart in her “Case Study Houses” exhibition. “He is an important figure in mid-20th-Century Southern California art and it’s important to look at his work again.

“The materials he used were extremely progressive. His work had a very wonderful commingling of the organic and the technological, he was really quite unique in that respect. The forms he employed were extremely varied.

“He was also interested in craft. He had almost a magical sensibility to some of the works he created. They were for pure pleasure, as well as for usage.”

Susan Larsen, a former curator of the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection in New York, wrote the catalogue essay to De Swart’s 1986 show at the Laguna Art Museum and recalls being captivated by the artist’s sculpture.

“It was like unwrapping a treasure you didn’t know existed,” said Larsen, a professor of art history at USC. “I’m not going to say he was the most pivotal sculptor in Southern California, because I don’t think we know yet. We can’t really judge until they’re out in the world in a broader context.”

Had De Swart moved to New York, the place where serious artists of his era went to launch careers, had he courted influential critics, stuck to one medium, or even embraced Abstract Expressionism after World War II, like so many of his contemporaries, curators say he might have become better known.

But De Swart chose to hole up in a California canyon, far from the gallery and art crowd. His life was solitary, austere, tended by a wife who devoted herself to his care and even taught herself photography so she could document her husband’s efforts.

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“Jan didn’t fit into what was popular at the moment and he didn’t care, he just kept making his work till the day he died,” said William Otton, who organized De Swart’s biggest solo exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum and is now president of the Wichita Center for the Arts in Kansas.

To illustrate how little known De Swart was, Otton says he learned about the sculptor not from an art world encounter but while attending a reception at Caltech, where scientists sat around and raved about a quirky artist friend.

His curiosity piqued, Otton finagled an invitation to Allegro and was amazed by De Swart’s work.

“He had an original statement to contribute to the visual arts, and I think it would be a sad commentary if his work was set aside and lost because of his personality and the (then) current tastes,” Otton says. “He is an important person with a particular aesthetic that he held fast to throughout his career.”

Jan de Swart’s life is recorded in Ursula de Swart’s poignant memoir, “Who Is Moving My Hand: Life With Jan de Swart, Sculptor,” which is currently circulating at New York publishing houses. It was Ursula who kept the world at bay so her husband could focus on his art. She ran the house, paid the bills, even learned to drive because the artist didn’t. And she wrote it all down for posterity, certain in her heart that her husband would someday be famous.

“His workshop was a separate world,” Ursula wrote in her diary. “Creation is a solitary experience. Except for small children, no one entered the (work) shop without disturbing its inner music. I myself felt a strong barrier at the shop door, though perhaps it was of my own making, for I was aware of the need for an inviolable place where Jan could be himself, with no intrusions.”

Orphaned at 11, De Swart began his career carving ecclesiastical furniture in Holland and was soon awing the master craftsmen with his skills.

He emigrated to the United States in 1929 and spent time prospecting for gold in Arizona.

In the 1930s, De Swart lived in an artist’s colony in Calabasas when it was still ravening, beautiful wilderness. He slept on a cot, cooked his dinner over an open fire and stole off with Ursula over the Santa Monica Mountains for long afternoons in the sand dunes of Malibu.

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Unlike the self-taught De Swart, his wife-to-be was part and parcel of California’s immigrant artist aristocracy. Her father was German architect Jock Peters, who fled the beginnings of Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and brought his family to Los Angeles, where he eventually drew acclaim for designing the interior of Bullock’s Wilshire, among other things.

The couple settled at Allegro in 1942, where De Swart set about transforming the California Craftsman home into an elfin treehouse with wrap-around porches, fantastical furniture and sculpted works in every nook of the rambling building.

Allegro was an evolving work of art. In harmony with its surroundings, the home beckoned children and adults alike, who poured for hours over Swart’s functional art, toys, puzzles and sculptures.

Artists and architects made the pilgrimage from as near as the Otis/Parsons School of Art and Design and as far away as Japan and Europe.

One visitor told Ursula that Allegro reminded him of the workshop of Geppetto, the fictional toymaker who created “Pinocchio.”

Despite his low profile, De Swart had an eclectic circle of friends. They ranged from Hollywood director John Huston to Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman to John Entenza, the avant-garde editor who featured De Swart in his seminal California Arts and Architecture magazine.

“It is difficult to place a man like Jan de Swart in any one time or any one situation,” Entenza wrote. “His special and peculiar talents flow too readily . . . from one media to another. . . ..

“He seems to be able to turn things inside out and to penetrate the ‘innerness’ of the material or object he touches.”

De Swart’s generous vision of art embraced all mediums, all materials. In the 1940s, he was one of the first to create art with plastics. He grew friendly with Du Pont chemists, who would mail him samples of their latest synthetics so the artist could experiment and report back.

Indeed, De Swart was an inveterate inventor as well as an artist.

“I found I could visualize just about anything before it existed. My work comes from that ability to visualize the unknown,” De Swart told Larsen in the mid-1980s.

In addition to sculpting, De Swart held more than 100 scientific patents in his lifetime, including one of the first plastic baby bottles. Among his other inventions: aircraft fasteners, appliance shelves and doors, container tops used in food and medicine packaging and airplane joint seals. But when offered lucrative jobs with large corporations, De Swart refused. He needed to be free to explore.

In her essay, Larsen wrote that “engineers marveled at (De Swart’s) direct approach to physical problems usually addressed by math and computers in a laboratory.”

She said the artist solved scientific problems intuitively, understanding them “as a sculptor who must envision form and produce it with his own hands.”

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After World War II, De Swart moved from wood to aluminum, from assemblage art to surreal sculptures with the plastics he loved so well. He also adored carving children’s toys, injecting chemicals into plastic to watch the colorful reaction and pouring molten aluminum onto wood molds that promptly shattered to create art he called his “Lost Wood Process.”

In the late 1950s, De Swart was commissioned to create a group of aluminum sculptures and bas-reliefs for the Oakland corporate headquarters of Kaiser Aluminum.

But through it all, De Swart remained contemplative, more attuned to the rhythms of nature than those of the art market. He often woke before dawn and worked feverishly all day, stopping only to eat the Dutch pancakes that his wife brought him.

De Swart regularly vexed Ursula and others who sought to expose him to a wider world. He obstinately refused most offers to sell his pieces, even to close friends. Later, the consequences of the couple’s solitary life began to dawn.

“Jan cries out to me, ‘Why am I neglected,’ ” Ursula wrote toward the end of her life. “He does not accept my explanation that all these years he neglected the traditional ways of making yourself known--sales, galleries, university archives, lectures and institutes that fill a life. But when, as now, we put all the photographs of his work over the long years and see the incredible achievement . . . we really do wonder that no one comes to seek him out.”

Years later, their son continues to ask the same question. Jock de Swart recently sold Allegro to an artist couple and trucked his father’s remaining works to his house in Palms. In the process, he also found original drawings, correspondence and diaries of his grandfather, Jock Peters, which may also have historical significance.

Sitting in his house contemplating a six-foot wooden mobile called “Ship of Fools,” De Swart reminisces about his father’s gifts and shows off his most treasured pieces. It is this legacy he wants to share with the world--if the world is interested.

“My dad’s real joy came from the process of making these pieces,” De Swart muses. “He would want people to get enjoyment out of it. The more who could be inspired by it, the better. And that’s how I feel too. The thought of this sitting locked away somewhere is my worst fear.”