Artistic License : Andrea Van de Kamp is the perfect ‘people person’: She never forgets a name and likes shaking hands. That comes in handy in her role at Sotheby’s --and as John Van de Kamp’s wife.

The Van Gogh behind her may be prized for its painterly lines, but Andrea Van de Kamp is also a virtuoso in cultivating lines--receiving lines, in her case. Tonight she works one like a pro, framing the door of Sotheby’s new Wilshire Boulevard exhibition space with graciousness and, more to the point, a killer memory.

As a seemingly endless supply of carefully coiffed ladies and gentlemen file by on one of the auction house’s festive opening evenings, Sotheby’s managing director of West Coast operations personally greets a staggering number of them, never forgetting a name and often tossing in a flattering snippet of past conversation.

“She makes everyone feel important and that’s really a trick,” says longtime friend Bruce Corwin, president of Metropolitan Theaters Corp. “Andrea is my vitamin pill. She has such energy and such a positive outlook on life, and she has such an incredibly wonderful sense of humor. She has the best people skills of any person I’ve ever met.”

If you didn’t know better, you’d think Van de Kamp were running for queen of the art auction world. Indeed, when her dull-but-earnest husband, John Van de Kamp, was running for the Democratic nod for governor of California in 1990, some wags remarked that if he’d had a bit of her sparkle and spunk, there might have been a Van de Kamp in Sacramento.

“If you could just merge the Van de Kamps,” Joe Cerrell, dean of California’s Democratic political consultants, said at the time, “if he just had Andrea’s personality, why, he’d be hell to stop, ever.”

For Andrea, it’s a simple equation--she likes people, she says. “I genuinely enjoy people who have a different beat on life. I see a roomful of people and there’s so-and-so who likes my favorite comic strip and so-and-so who makes me laugh. I don’t tend to see the title. I tend to see people. I don’t see whether somebody is rich or somebody is poor.”

Which would come in handy if one were, say, thinking of governing a territory as diverse as California. Not that Andrea Van de Kamp, 52, would dream of stepping up to the gubernatorial plate herself.

“Nobody ever thanks you for what you do,” she says, sitting in her art-filled office at Sotheby’s. “And I don’t care who you are, at some juncture in your life, you want to be thanked. I mean, we’re not talking bouquets and roses and ‘Aren’t you fabulous?’ Just, ‘Thanks, that was a nice thing for you to come out on Wednesday night in the rain.’

“If I am giving a speech on behalf of Sotheby’s, they thank me profusely. If you’re an elected official going out to do that, nobody says thank you. They think they’re coming to do you a favor because you need their vote.”

The trials of the campaign trail probably mean there won’t be a Van de Kamp of either stripe seeking political office in the foreseeable future. Instead, Andrea Van de Kamp brings her political skills to the tricky world of selling big-ticket art in tight times and wooing casual collectors with moderately priced prints.

She has ushered her province of the preeminent art auction house from the depths of the early ‘90s art market plunge to a period of optimism and growth in Los Angeles, paralleled by the recent openings of Beverly Hills branches of two important New York galleries--PaceWildenstein and Larry Gagosian.

In October, Sotheby’s unveiled a 13,000-square-foot space on the ground floor of a high-rise at 9665 Wilshire Blvd. The new facility houses an auction space for the first time since Sotheby’s closed its Beverly Boulevard sales room in 1982, and it embraces exhibitions, administrative offices and the Sotheby’s International Realty Co.

From its lush new perch, Sotheby’s hopes to broaden its constituency, luring fresh clients from the Pacific Rim and Hollywood’s pool of well-heeled young agents to a regular regime of jewelry and print sales. Diana D. Brooks, Sotheby’s president and CEO, credits Van de Kamp with choreographing the expansion since she joined the company in July, 1989.

“I think it was really her idea to begin with,” Brooks says. “She found this building as an opportunity, and over two years really pushed for this to happen. I think it’s really important for our future out there. She believes in the West Coast and the potential for collecting out there.”

“She added a face to Sotheby’s here,” says Maurice Tuchman, former senior curator of 20th century art at the L.A. County Museum of Art. “You knew there was someone in your time zone you could call and get a fast answer. And the way she works in society seems to me beneficial to a firm that wants to broaden its base.”

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While Van de Kamp is no hothouse art maven, having joined the ranks mid-career, her earlier incarnations--and broad contacts--are considered the art world’s gain.

“She’s known as somebody with tremendous energy and enthusiasm, with wonderful connections in the political world and the cultural world and the educational world,” says Marc Selwyn, the West Coast head of the New York-based PaceWildenstein Gallery and formerly Sotheby’s West Coast director of fine arts. “I think that’s very rare, to have someone who can travel through all those circles effectively. She’s a charming, bright person people want to be around. She’s magnetic.”

Van de Kamp’s passion for the arts also led her to chair the Music Center Operating Co. She was honored for her recent stint commandeering the center’s purse strings at last month’s St. Petersburg Fantasy Ball, which featured Russian royalty and the L.A. Master Chorale.

“I care very much about the Music Center,” Van de Kamp says. “It’s been a major part of my volunteer life. I think you don’t think bad thoughts, you don’t do bad things when you listen to beautiful music. It’s the same reason I like the visual arts. You don’t usually think bad things when you’re looking at something beautiful.”

Van de Kamp is the first to acknowledge that she steers the course without being an art expert. Sotheby’s doesn’t consider that a problem.

“She’s a people expert,” Brooks says. “That’s what’s most important to us. She can work with the art experts.”

But some say Van de Kamp’s people skills are exaggerated. An ex-employee, who found her high energy grating, called her “a cheerleader on speed.”

Another art world insider says Van de Kamp sometimes exhibits a sharp temper and takes credit for more than her share.

“She wants to make the client-contact phone call, and she has the expert sit in her office feeding her information. I don’t think it’s a very fair way of doing things. She wants to be the contact if it’s important. She’s making herself a larger figure. I don’t think it’s about ego at all. I think it’s much more crafty than that. She’s like a politician.”

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Even her critics concede, however, that Van de Kamp has established a firm beachhead in the L.A. art world; before her Sotheby’s stint, she spearheaded the fund drive to raise an endowment for the Museum of Contemporary Art and served on the board of LACMA. She has also wended her way through the upper reaches of the city’s political and educational worlds as Southern California chief of the Coro Foundation, which helps train people for public service, and as president of the Independent Colleges of Southern California, among other stops.

“You look at my resume and it’s all over the place,” she says. “It’s the things I love the most, and I guess all of us are a product of the things that we love. I like kids, and I’ve always been interested in education. That is really the great equalizer, the great opportunity for all of us. And I’ve always loved politics--I minored in political science.”

Which indirectly led her to the altar. Who did she marry?

“Somebody walks in, a D.A., and I thought it was a haircut.”

Actually, John Van de Kamp was a lawyer; in the early ‘70s, he became Southern California’s first federal public defender. She met him through a Dartmouth connection--he was an alumnus and she was the school’s first female admissions officer. Since she traveled for the school, another Dartmouth alum suggested they meet.

Andrea, who had amicably divorced her high school sweetheart, was game.

“When I was [at Dartmouth], everybody thought a woman had to be married,” she says. “Everybody would say, ‘You’re such a nice person. Is something the matter with you?’ They didn’t want to believe you might actually be quite comfortable single. I wasn’t really that anxious to get married, and I don’t think John was either because he’d never been married. When he got married, he was 42. I was 35.”

John Van de Kamp, now an attorney in private practice, admires his wife’s ability to light up a room. “I walk into a room, I don’t even have to see her to know she’s there because I hear her laugh. She’s a naturally ebullient person.”

Friends say Andrea’s sometimes wicked sense of humor is a fine foil for her husband’s seriousness.

“She kids her husband mercilessly,” says Corwin, who worked with Van de Kamp at Coro. “They’re neat as a couple because they really complement each other.”

The Van de Kamps, who live in Pasadena with their 16-year-old daughter, Diana, also mesh their taste for intense and interesting lives driven by work.

“One of the reasons that we like one another is we both have a great deal of respect for our careers,” Andrea says. “I was never troubled when he was in politics and he had to travel a lot. Or I was out a lot. There are times you get tired of rubber-chicken dinners. But I would say for the whole, when you’ve taken a look over a span of how many years, we’ve really held up remarkably well as a team.”

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The art side of Van de Kamp’s ledger was written by her artist mother. Rosemary Stickel was a commercial artist in Detroit, and she gently polished her daughter’s tomboyish edges, luring Andrea from baseball diamonds to museums on rainy afternoons. Her parents split when she was 3, and Van de Kamp didn’t see her father again until she was 45. She says the reunion made her believe in grace.

Van de Kamp’s doctor had suggested she find her father so she could determine her medical history. Although she had been close to her stepfather, Van de Kamp found herself compelled to seek out the man whose surname she’d carried before marriage--Andrew Messenger.

All she knew was that he lived in Lansing, Mich., where she had gone to college at Michigan State. A telephone operator told her Messenger’s home number was unlisted. So she sought out the attorney general of her home state at a government conference during one of her husband’s two terms as California attorney general.

“I said, ‘I’m trying to find one of your constituents . . . Andrew L. Messenger.’ ”

“Oh, Andy,” he said. “He’s my dermatologist.”

Van de Kamp called information for his office number in August 1988, but for months she didn’t use it. She was still haunted by her grandmother’s long-ago explanation--which turned out to be fiction--that her father had disappeared because he was disappointed that she’d been a girl. On Nov. 7 that year, she finally summoned the nerve to dial.

“I said, ‘I’m half of you and I don’t know you and I would like the privilege of knowing you.’ And there was kind of a gasp on the other end of the phone. And he said, ‘I would like to know you too.’ ”

They arranged to meet in Chicago.

“I said, ‘Your only obligation before we hang up this phone is for you to be ready to sit down for dinner by 8 o’clock, Dec. 8th. And he said, ‘This is going to be interesting.’ So I’m about ready to hang up now. He said, ‘You have just made my 65th birthday the best day of my life.’

“I’d had that number since August 1988 sitting on my desk. And I do not know even at this moment, why I picked that day to call. But it happened to be his birthday, and I decided from that day on, there’s something up there operating.”

Van de Kamp’s mother had sought full custody because she didn’t want her daughter shuttling between homes. But after Andrea rediscovered her birth father as well as her half siblings from his subsequent marriage, the scenario played out anyway.

“So now when I go back to Michigan, here I am in my 50s, I’ve got to go see my mother, I’ve got to go see my father. So for the first time in my life, I’m living the life of [the child of] a divorce.

“It’s sort of funny, actually. But they’re both wonderful people, and I’m clearly their daughter. My mother loves the arts and my father loves sports, and I am so much like both of them it’s unbelievable.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Andrea Van de Kamp

Age: 52.

Background: Born in Detroit. Now lives in a two-story Monterey colonial in Pasadena south of the Rose Bowl.

Family: Married to attorney John Van de Kamp. They have one daughter, Diana, 16.

Passions: The arts, sports, politics, education.

On riding the campaign trail with her husband during the 1990 primary for California governor: “Campaigning gave me peripheral vision. We all have our own set of eyes. We all have our own set of beliefs. But suddenly you get on the campaign trail and you meet people who have had very different lives and very different beliefs than you have. And they feel just as passionately about theirs as you do about yours. It’s one thing to read about them. It’s another thing to look somebody in the eye and have a very strong difference of opinion.”

On supporting the arts in Los Angeles: “One of the reasons why you want to go to New York City is so that you can go to the museums. I would like people to feel that one of the reasons they come to Los Angeles is because of LACMA, because there’s MOCA, because there’s a Getty. I would love them to feel the same vibrancy and love for this city, and that only happens when people care about these institutions and keep them alive.”

On steering Sotheby’s West Coast operations without credentials as an art expert: “I love to learn, and it’s a treat to go around with people who know more than I do about a particular area. I have found that a delicious, rewarding part of the job rather than a liability. And I’ve never pretended to be something I’m not.”

On affirmative action: “I honestly feel, from the experiences I’ve had professionally, that we’ve made better decisions because we’ve been a team--male and female, black, Chicano. It’s not always comfortable and there have been some moments of tension. But the end result is we’ve all grown up some. We’ve probably all been challenged some and we’ve all been pushed some. And I would just like to come down on the side of somebody who’s willing to grow.”