Lots of Crowned Heads at Billy Wilder’s Big Carnival : Art: ‘The whole idea is to have fun,’ says the filmmaker, collector and now curator of ‘Billy Wilder’s Marche aux Puces,’ an exhibition of whimsical works.

Billy Wilder has a message for all you sourpusses, stick-in-the-muds and snobs: “If you don’t have a sense of humor, don’t come.”

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The legendary film director isn’t talking about his movies--or re-creations of them. While Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of Wilder’s classic 1950 motion picture “Sunset Boulevard” is causing a stir at the Shubert Theatre stage in Century City, Wilder is making his debut as a curator and visual artist.

“Billy Wilder’s Marche aux Puces”--an exhibition of works for sale that Wilder has selected, collected and created in collaboration with assemblagist Bruce Houston--is at the Louis Stern Galleries in Beverly Hills. On the subject of this, his latest project, Wilder has a few things to say.

“The whole idea is to have fun,” he says of the eclectic show, named for a flea market in Paris. “We need a shot of humor in these miserable days of depression and global wars. We have to forget about Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and just relax.”

An inveterate and savvy collector, Wilder, 87, buys a wide array of high and low art, antiques and bric-a-brac, sometimes recycling found objects into artistic creations. He has purchased sober abstractions and expressions of human frailty, but he gravitates to art that has a humorous, if piquant, twist. “My idea of suicide is to bring four (Mark) Rothko paintings into a hotel room, hang them on the walls, turn on some eternal music and drink California wine,” he says over a lunch of Italian pasta and Merlot. “I’m all for Mr. Rothko and Mr. (Francis) Bacon when their work is in museums, but they are tough to live with. After looking at their work for half an hour, you feel a little bit more depressed.”

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In contrast, his curatorial debut is designed to evoke smiles. “It is done with the eye of a picture maker,” Wilder says. “After 60 years in pictures, I am very apprehensive and knowledgeable about how people look at things, how the eye wanders. In movies I try to remove all chance of boredom, keep waking people up, get some kind of response.” His approach to installing artworks is the same. “I want people to leave in a better mood, to feel enriched,” he says.

To that end, Wilder has thrown himself into the exhibition--and has driven Stern and his associates to distraction--by repeatedly rearranging the show, right up to the opening. “There’s never a dull minute with this guy,” says Stern, who proposed the project a couple of years ago but doubted that it would ever happen.

A Wilder/Houston concoction, “Fresh Mondrians for Sale,” gives visitors their first wake-up call, near the entrance to the gallery. The sculpture consists of a sweet, 19th-Century figure with outstretched arms holding one of Houston’s works--a truck with an outsize trailer that resembles a classic Mondrian abstraction. As the show continues, lighthearted pieces by Saul Steinberg, David Hockney and Zuka mingle with paintings by Pablo Picasso and Paul Delvaux, Alexander Calder mobiles, Charles Eames furniture, folk art and African sculpture.

Wilder’s wit can be detected in such pieces as Fernando Botero’s bulbous bronze horse and Paul Wunderlich’s portrayal of a boneless contortionist, but it comes on strong in works that he has a hand in creating. And in collaborations with Houston, he pulls out all the stops.

The comedic tour de force is “Variations on a Theme by Queen Nefertete,” a series of painted plaster sculptures that interprets a famous bust of the Egyptian queen in the styles of modern and contemporary artists, or merges her persona with Wilder’s heroes, Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx. Installed in plexiglass boxes along a wall, the improbable busts compose a loony tour of 20th-Century art history, punctuated by Einstein’s brilliance and Groucho’s comic style. There are two Matisses--one with a ring of dancers painted on the queen’s headpiece and the other decorated with familiar leaf shapes--a Picasso Nefertete with two faces and a straw hat, a Frank Stella queen wearing a pin-striped neckline and a protractor headpiece, and a Jackson Pollock version with drip-covered clothing.

Bizarre as these artworks may appear, they evolved quite logically, according to Wilder, who became infatuated with an ancient painted-limestone bust of Nefertete that he saw as a youth at the Berlin State Museum. He left Berlin for Paris in 1933 and arrived in Hollywood in 1934, but the image of Nefertete stuck in his mind and turned into a wacky idea.

“I wanted to see how other artists would portray her, but they were all too busy,” Wilder says in a characteristic deadpan. “My great luck was running into Bruce Houston, a special artist with an odd sense of humor and the ability to take criticism well. When I found out where he was hiding out, we clicked.”

According to Houston, their tastes and senses of humor are remarkably compatible. “We both like things that are surreal or off-the-wall,” he says.

Wilder discovered Houston’s assemblage three years ago at a collector friend’s house, tracked the artist down at his home in North Palm Springs and bought a few pieces for himself. Their collaboration, which began about a year and half ago, became so time-consuming that Houston has temporarily put his own work on hold. Their first creation was an Andy Warhol number with a simulated Campbell’s soup can forming Nefertete’s headpiece. Then came sequels--Nefertetes a la Salvador Dali, Jean Dubuffet, Amedeo Modigliani and Christo.

“We don’t want to make Nefertetes the rest of our lives,” Wilder says, but if orders stack up for the full editions of nine for all 14 “Variations,” Houston will be busy for many months. Before the opening he had completed only one or two of each bust. Although cast in plaster from a mold of a miniature reproduction, each sculpture requires meticulous hand-painting and some call for additions to or subtractions from the basic form. The Modigliani version has an elongated neck, while the Botero has puffy cheeks.

Other collaborations are sprinkled around the gallery. For one work, Houston has made a painted wood fish that wears a top hat and rides a wire bicycle, which Wilder found in an antique shop. “Billy thought the bicycle needed a fish,” Houston says, as if that were perfectly normal.

Before he persuaded Houston to propel his ideas into artworks, Wilder occasionally collaborated with artist Richard Saar. Among pieces on view from that period is “Stallone’s Typewriter,” which transforms an old-fashioned typewriter into a glorified battlefield, bristling with American flags and toy soldiers.

“Billy Wilder’s Marche aux Puces” has come as something of a surprise to the art community because it was assumed that a 1989 auction of Wilder’s collection was his swan song. He sold 85 Impressionist, modern and contemporary artworks at the height of the art market frenzy for a whopping $32.6 million, but that didn’t wipe out his collection or stifle his acquisitive instincts. In an odd turn of fate, one work sold in the auction has reappeared in the current show. An unidentified collector who bought Joan Miro’s 1927 painting “L’etoile” for $2.6 million heard about the exhibition and consigned the artwork to the gallery--at the price he paid for it.

While chatting about the show, Wilder dismisses his involvement with art as “more or less an exercise in doing nothing between pictures.” But, in the next breath, he extols the rewards of collecting. “It has really enriched my life to dabble, to have art, to hang it and rehang it--and to have fun with it,” he says.

“You may be baffled (by some pieces) but you will not be bored. I guarantee that,” he tells potential viewers in a printed introduction to the show. “So come on in and bring your money.”

* “Billy Wilder’s Marche aux Puces,” Louis Stern Galleries, 9528 Brighton Way, Beverly Hills, (310) 276-0147. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Jan. 31.