Little-Known Collectors Into Scenery, Not Art Scene

The words “Sunland” and “art collection” are seldom found in the same sentence.

This hilly, east San Fernando Valley community is known for its Harleys and horse corrals, not sculpture gardens or galas.

But down a dirt road, in an unassuming house tucked into a hillside, live Stuart and Judith Spence, who over the last 25 years have quietly amassed a collection of contemporary art notable enough to be included in ArtNews magazine’s annual list of the top 200 international collections.

The Spences last week donated 109 pieces from their collection to the recently reorganized Laguna Art Museum, which specializes in works by California artists.

This gift will not likely cause much of a ripple in the art world, even though it includes pieces by well-known Southern California artist John Baldessari. The combined appraisal of the works is $250,000, a pittance compared to the worth of single pieces donated regularly to cultural institutions.

The Spences have given major works, too. Their pieces grace the collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, neither of which accepts donated works unless they measure up to the institution’s standards.

And the couple is known for buying the works of young, emerging artists.

So what are they doing in Sunland, far from the usual artist and art collector enclaves?

“We love it here,” enthused Stuart Spence, a friendly bear of a guy with white hair and a full beard. He has a doctorate in physics and is involved in three industrial science start-ups.

He politely declined to give his age. “Just say I have gotten gray.”

He gave a quick tour of the upper part of their 1923 house, which is packed with artworks sometimes hard to distinguish from mementos and other household items.

He pointed out a view from the front window that includes the Verdugo Mountains, palm trees, an occasional peacock and no neighbors.

“It is just right for us,” he said. “We were never much part of the art scene, anyway.”

Which is not entirely accurate. Judith Spence, who has a practice in psychoanalysis and psychiatry in Pasadena, was formerly chairwoman of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. Both Spences have been invited to participate in conferences focusing on California art, and they serve on the board of the celebrated--although definitely out-of-the-mainstream--Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.

But it’s true that neither had any formal training before entering the art world. They didn’t feel the need for expert guidance, they just knew what they liked.

“This was talking to me in a very personal way,” Spence said of the first time he saw a Baldessari work. The year was 1972, at a show in the Pasadena Art Museum, now the home of the Norton Simon Museum of Art.

The story of Spence’s discovery is recounted in a videotaped gallery talk the couple gave last year when pieces from their collection were on view at the Laguna museum.

“People couldn’t understand why someone was just jumping up and down in front of this work and wouldn’t leave the museum,” Spence told the audience.

The work that got him so interested in Baldessari consisted of a series of “very simple, almost crude photographs with text underneath,” as he described it.

The text told of a painting that deteriorated so much over the years that only the nail it hung from remained.

Spence, who was new to Southern California at the time, asked museum officials where he could see more works by Baldessari.

“He lives in Venice,” they told him.

“I thought, ‘My God,’ ” Spence said, “ ‘I’m going to have to go to Italy.’ ”

Conceptual art like Baldessari’s, in which the emphasis is placed more on the tools and techniques of making an object rather than on the object itself, often makes use of text, photographs, video and even large, constructed environments that viewers can enter and walk around in.

“They are works geared toward the analytical,” said gallery owner Rosamund Felsen, who has sold several works to the Spences over the years, beginning in the early 1970s. “More analytical than visual.”

Which might explain why the works had an immediate appeal to the Spences, both of whom are scientists.

Since then, conceptual art has grown popular. Perhaps too much so, according to Felsen.

“People have stopped learning how to look at a painting, which takes a long time,” she said. “You have to stand there and just look. It’s not like reading text.”

But the Spences say they don’t care about art trends. For them, the worth of a piece of art is measured in how it has affected their lives, both separately and together.

“This is a 25-year-long conversation that has been going on between the two of us,” said Judith Spence during their presentation last year in Laguna. “We are not the people we were when we first walked into John Baldessari’s fog-shrouded studio 25 years ago.”

One thing has definitely changed. The artist that came into their lives when they finally got to the Venice studio is no longer obscure.

“It’s exciting when someone you collected from early on becomes accepted,” Stuart Spence said, looking out the picture window and laughing. “At the same time you have this pang that you will never again be able to afford his art.”