Culture Vulture

“Odd Man In” is the story of one man’s obsessive and astonishingly successful drive to amass the greatest art collection money could buy in the second half of the 20th century, long after the robber barons had scoured Europe for the best it had to offer. It’s a story of power and money and the role they play in the higher echelons of the art world. It’s a story of deals and betrayals, of the museum monopoly game of egos and edifices, of the way our cultural institutions are driven by the sometimes imperious egos of the super wealthy and the boards they sit on. And from a broader perspective, it’s the story of the cultural birth pangs of Los Angeles in its catch-up struggle to become a cosmopolitan city as the author, Los Angeles Times art writer Suzanne Muchnic turns the raw stuff of art world lore and scandal into history by thorough documentation and careful narration.

Norton Simon was born in 1907 in Portland, Ore., to a family of Jewish immigrant descent. The man Muchnic portrays is a paradox, a man of great possessions whose sympathies lay with the dispossessed, a regent of the University of California who took the side of academic freedom with faculty and students in confrontation with then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, a ruthless corporate tyrant who could be soft-hearted with his employees, a self-taught businessman of powerful self-interest endowed with passionate commitment to contribute to the education and well-being of others. From his father, he inherited a restless entrepreneurial spirit; from his mother, who died when he was 14, the conviction that “he would rule the world.” A dropout from UC Berkeley, Simon migrated south in 1925 with a lust for the good life and the ambition to support it by getting rich. He was, Muchnic writes, “a man about town--and a daredevil. He bought himself a terra-cotta and beige Nash convertible to get around in style.”

Simon had an instinct for the art of corporate takeover: A penny stock market investor in his teens, he came out of the 1929 crash ahead of the game and purchased a controlling interest in the bankrupt Vita-Pac orange juice company in 1931, turning it to profit in short order; and his acquisition of Hunt Foods in 1942 cinched the foundation of an eventually vast financial empire in the food and canning industry. Filling in this essential background information, Muchnic uses it also to shed light on the qualities that made Simon a brilliant and obsessively demanding art collector. She finds in his business life the reflection of both his insatiable acquisitive self-interest and his cultural philanthropy: “More than almost any other man,” she cites from a 1966 Business Week article, “he represents in a single image both the old and the new of American corporate life--both the secretive individual builder of investment empires . . and the modern renaissance businessman who sees capitalism not only as a way of survival, but as a path toward the betterment of human beings.”

As a collector, Simon’s interests began with French Impressionism and soon extended to European Baroque and Renaisance, eventually embracing the arts of Asia. He was a fiercely competitive buyer with the moves of a poker player, staking out the competition and holding his cards close, ready not only to risk everything on a single play but also to wait for the right moment to strike. He played the same way as a benefactor, anxious that the fruits of his activity should contribute to the common weal. Forty-seven years old before he began collecting art, he started with the intention of simply adorning a new residence in Hancock Park. Not liking what the decorators offered, he went out looking for himself and came home, after painstaking research, with a $16,000 painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and, soon after that, with another by Pierre Bonnard. “I didn’t jump off a cliff,” he told the author in an interview conducted before his death in 1993. “I had a lot business experience. I knew a few questions to ask.” That was an understatement. Soon notorious among dealers and museum curators alike for his lengthy late-night telephone calls, he picked their brains for information as if he were a vulture after carrion, playing one against the other in a guessing game that kept all parties but himself off-balance, eager to please a man who could afford substantial purchases or gifts and unwilling to lose whatever edge they might gain by catering to his needs.

Some of the most intriguing passages in Muchnic’s book cover Simon’s buying habits, his secretive pre-sales strategies with auctioneers, his manipulation of dealers to his own advantage in long months of negotiations and trades whose arcane details only he was liable to remember. Many of these stories read like mini-thrillers. Simon’s insistence on impeccable condition affords us countless insights into the world of conservation and restoration. We learn about a disputed “school of Botticelli” painting, for example, judged a fake by experts until a conservator brought in by Simon skillfully revealed an authentic painting by the master beneath a botched restoration job. As important as condition is an artwork’s provenance, and Simon would spend months assuring himself of the history of a picture’s pedigree before agreeing to a deal. The story of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s sensuous twin paintings of Adam and Eve takes us from 18th century St. Petersburg and the Russian court to confiscation by the Bolsheviks, a contested sale at a Berlin auction to a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a second confiscation by Hitler’s henchman Hermann Goering and their reclamation and eventual return to an heir of the original aristocratic Russian owners before Simon bought them through a dealer in New York. And the long saga of the Shiva Nataraja (Lord of the Dance) a rare sacred 10th century bronze figure arguably stolen from the temple of Sivapuram in India, purchased by Simon in a typically torturous deal in 1972 and eventually returned to the Indian government after lengthy byzantine negotiations, is a cautionary tale of the legal and moral niceties involved these days in acquiring treasures from the patrimony of other countries and cultures.

Of vital importance locally is the part that Simon played in shaping the cultural map of Los Angeles in the second half of this century. Unlike major East Coast cities whose museums had benefited from the largess of legendary art patrons like J.P. Morgan, Paul Mellon and Henry Clay Frick, Los Angeles was long ridiculed as a culture-free desert. The County Museum of History, Art and Science was chiefly known for housing the bones from the La Brea Tar Pits; the Huntington Library was the city’s only respected art resource. A critical wake-up call came with the loss of the outstanding Walter C. Annenberg collection to the Philadelphia Art Museum in 1951, after desultory negotiations with UCLA to erect a suitable building. In the mid-1950s, Simon joined Broadway-Hales President Ed Carter and other civic leaders in plans to finance a free-standing art museum and move it to a site on Wilshire Boulevard. Muchnic’s book is a must-read for those looking for a comprehensive and fair-minded version of the fabled clash of titans between Simon and Howard Ahmanson of Home Savings and Loan--the gifts promised, conditioned and withdrawn (at one stage, Ahmanson was insisting that not only the museum building, but also every subsequent addition, be named after him), the choice of architect and the continuing political intrigue involving the Los Angeles County supervisors. When the museum complex finally opened its doors to the public in 1965, Muchnic writes, “[t]he Ahmanson building was erected to display the museum’s permanent collection, but in terms of monetary value, almost half the art on view there belonged to Simon or his foundations.”

The disposal of Simon’s art holdings into personal and foundation collections and the program of loans and gifts that assured their tax-sheltered status are another part of Muchnic’s story, as is the fascinating, often exasperating glimpse she offers into the ego-politics of philanthropy. Like other mega-collectors--Armand Hammer and Simon’s brother-in-law Frederick R. Weisman come immediately to mind--Simon spent years dangling his carrot in front of various local institutions, including the county museum and UCLA, his main condition being the erection of a dedicated building to house it. Eventually, like Hammer and Weisman, he snatched it away from all of them, opting for the personal monument museum that would presumably preserve his name and the integrity of his collection in perpetuity.

In Simon’s case, the opportunity presented itself in 1974 in the form of the floundering Pasadena Art Museum--for a few years the brash standard-bearer of the contemporary art community--whose board looked to the great artist of corporate takeover for financial rescue. Having invited the shark to dine, however, they were perhaps somewhat naively surprised to find themselves the dinner: Simon made short work of replacing the existing board with his own supporters and turning the museum into the repository for his collections. Muchnic recounts this action in revealing detail, including the furious resentment of the art world when works donated to the museum by board members and artists began appearing quietly on the auction block in New York.

Amid all the detail Muchnic provides us with, I missed some glimpse of the human qualities that motivated the man and made him tick. As the author herself notes in her coda, “most of the characterizations that seem to suit him--troubled genius, existential control freak, outsider on the inside--are equivocal if not paradoxical.” Perhaps, like many of his generation, he did not want to know these things himself and certainly did not want to show them. It is through his actions that we know him. Like them or not--and there are still many in the Los Angeles art world who still despise them--Norton Simon’s actions shifted the tectonic plates of the major institutions as they developed from the early 1950s through the mid-1970s and sent lasting ripple effects through the smaller ones. Arguably, even his acquisition of the Pasadena Art Museum contributed to the foundation of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1980, since it drove supporters to fill the vacuum left by PAM’s demise. Indeed, from this perspective, Simon would have to be counted a more central figure than the yet more opulent John Paul Getty, who chose largely to isolate himself and his collection from civic institutions. He was above the fray. Not so Simon, whose contribution was in part his scrappy willingness to roll up his sleeves. And by any measure, his contribution was significant: Today, a scant 50 years after his first purchase, Los Angeles must be counted among major international cultural centers.