Home-Based Valley Art Dealer Personifies Earlier Era

A couple of years ago, an art-loving media mogul found his way to the Sherman Oaks home of Carl Schlosberg.

“Hello, I’m Rupert Murdoch. May I come in?” the mogul asked.

Murdoch explained to the semi-astonished Schlosberg that a mutual friend had suggested he come to the San Fernando Valley to visit the home that Schlosberg keeps full of art treasures. Murdoch said he might be interested in buying some. And he was. So he did.

By way of background, Schlosberg is Valley born and bred and came of age in the ‘50s of Pat Boone and the Mickey Mouse Club. But he has the artistic and intellectual soul of an expatriate in Paris, circa the 1920s.

He would have fit in well with that era’s aesthetic salons that attracted the Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso crowd, where art, literature and style were as torridly topical as the O.J. Simpson trial is today.

For 10 years, Schlosberg has run his own version of a home-based business. It’s a labor of love, but the rewards have been financial, as well as aesthetic, he says.

What he does is travel around the United States and Europe buying art, anything from old masters to emerging talent. It is then shipped home and he puts it around his house. There is art in the living room, dining room, bedrooms, bathrooms, hallways, closets and outside.

Occasionally, Schlosberg’s neighbors are somewhat shocked to see a giant crane lifting some massive art treasure over his two-story house and into the back yard.

Once the art is in place, Schlosberg again springs into action and invites about 3,000 of his closest friends to come and admire it.

They want to take it home, so he sells it.

Then, he starts all over again.

The current June show features the work of sculptor Ed Benavente. Schlosberg says he has previously sold the Santa Monica artist’s work, but only piece by piece.

“What Ed does is create a piece and as soon as he’s finished it, it seems he’s sold it. I talked him into doing about 25 pieces for this show,” Schlosberg says.

Schlosberg commissioned his first piece of art years ago from a fellow student at North Hollywood High School. During his years as a college student at UCLA and later as a teacher for five years at Chandler Elementary School, he collected more art.

Then, his need for entrepreneurial and educational experimentation got the better of him. He opened Castlemont School in Sherman Oaks in 1964.

“I wanted the school to not only teach basics, but to be a place where children could be introduced to music and art and their own creativity,” Schlosberg says.

About that time, on a blind date he met a young educator named Judy from Kansas City, Mo. He says he knew on the first date he wanted to marry her.

He asked. She said yes. They married. Soon after, they moved into the Sherman Oaks home where they still live.

When their two girls were 5 and 3, the Schlosbergs felt nicely settled. The school had moved to a larger campus in Encino and things were going well. Schlosberg, never one to dwell on the status quo, packed up his family and moved to Europe for a year.

“I wanted to share that with my family. My wife was all for it and the girls learned that new experiences can be wonderful at a very early age,” he says.

The couple’s oldest daughter, Suzanne, now 28, is a free-lance writer in the Bay Area. Jennifer, 26, is a conceptual and performance artist in New York.

According to Suzanne, her father was always the free-spirited one in charge of the Schlosberg Family’s Artistic Flying Circus and her mother was the detail-oriented, methodical one who kept the whole act afloat.

Carl Schlosberg says his is a marriage of true symbiosis. He buys and hangs art that he and Judy have both loved. She keeps the books and their lives on a secure course.

After the couple returned from Europe with their children, he returned to the school and ran it again for awhile. Then, his summer art-buying avocation turned into his vocation. He sold the school and began buying and selling art full time.

“It has been profitable, but that wasn’t the reason I am doing this,” says Schlosberg of his labor of love. “It has been going well even during the recent hard times. But I wouldn’t regret the time I’ve spent even if tomorrow I had to go out and pump gas.”

Those invited to a Sunday afternoon or Wednesday evening visit and a look at the Ed Benavente collection and other artworks will find themselves rubbing shoulders with an age-diverse group of aficionados. Teen-agers buying their first work of art for so much down and so much a month may be among the collectors, as might be 92-year-old Edith Wolfstein, one of Schlosberg’s longest-standing clients.

Schlosberg says that at one of his once-a-year shows, pieces sell for between $1,000 and $500,000. But buying something is not the only way to get another invitation. An appreciation of the work is.

Schlosberg is not strictly home-based. He has mounted many shows for private organizations and will long be remembered in Malibu for putting huge pieces of sculpture in every available open space at a community-sponsored show several years ago.

John Wayne’s Grandchildren Bet on Donations for Research

OK, so they’re not exactly hustling and shilling in Las Vegas.

But Maria Wayne, Teresa Wayne, Christopher Wayne and Brigid LaCava are all founders of Chapter II, which will hold its casino night fund-raiser at 7 p.m. June 16 at the Olympic Collection in West Los Angeles.

Teresa Wayne, a Burbank resident and director of the story department at Warner Bros., says the event will help fund the work of the Lorraine Mann Psychosocial Program of the John Wayne Cancer Institute at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.

She and her siblings are founding members of Chapter II, the second generation of the John Wayne Cancer Institute Auxiliary. It was formed about four years ago to raise money for the institute and now has about 400 members. The fund-raiser is open to all who know a bargain when they see one. The $60 admission fee covers a year’s membership in the organization, plus $100 in casino script.

Teresa Wayne explains that the institute was founded, after her grandfather’s death from cancer, with the help of her father--Michael Wayne, the late actor’s oldest son--and some of the doctors who had tended him at UCLA Medial Center.

As the institute grew and became a nationally recognized organization for research and experimentation, it was moved to St John’s, where institute directors felt there could be more personalized work with patients than at UCLA, which is a teaching facility.

Toluca Lake resident Michael Wayne is chairman of the board of the institute and one of Chapter II’s biggest supporters. “The auxiliary has raised money ever since the institute was founded shortly after my father’s death,” he says. “So, when the children of our auxiliary members said they wanted to form their own fund-raising organization, we parents were, of course, very proud.”

With Father’s Day coming up, Michael Wayne took a few moments to remember his father. “I remember him when he was fighting his second battle with cancer. He finally knew traditional medicine wasn’t working and told his doctors to try anything that might work. He volunteered to be a guinea pig. They microwaved him, took his veins out of his body and put them on the outside. You can’t imagine the things he went through,” Michael says.

He adds that his father figured that if he was a goner, at least he might be of use to people who would be afflicted after he died.

In that he was correct, as the work of the institute confirms.

Anyone wanting to check out the details of the casino night fund-raiser can call (310) 582-7137.