A rare look at beauty’s spoils

“I’M a truth teller,” said Myron Kunin, strolling into the Orange County Museum of Art and laying the ground rules for an interview. He can’t help speaking his mind, even with a tape recorder rolling, but he doesn’t want to embarrass himself or his family with some blurted-out indiscretion that ends up in the newspaper. “Be kind,” he pleaded as he edged into his story.

It could be the tale of a more ordinary 75-year-old entrepreneur who started buying art in his late 40s and accumulated a messy, mixed bag of stuff that fills his home and offices in Minneapolis. But that wouldn’t be Kunin, a beauty shop mogul who parlayed a small family business into Regis Corp., the world’s largest company in the hair salon industry. Despite his success in business, art is his passion and he’s a shrewdly independent collector. In the last 25 years or so he has amassed one of the best private holdings of American Modernist art -- a sampling of which is on view through Oct. 2 at the museum in Newport Beach.

In what amounts to a coup, Elizabeth Armstrong, deputy director for programs and chief curator at the small but enterprising museum, has persuaded Kunin to loan 75 paintings for the exhibition. Museums frequently borrow individual pieces from Kunin, but this is the first show exclusively devoted to his collection. Named “Villa America: American Moderns, 1900-1950” for American painter Gerald Murphy’s “Villa America” residence in southern France -- a Modernist mecca in the early 20th century -- the exhibition reveals Kunin’s eye for powerful images with seething emotion, strong color and high contrast. The lineup of portraits, figure studies and American scenes offers haunting faces, muscular hunks of male flesh, voluptuous female nudes, cities built on human ambition and conflict.

“I like a painting that reaches in and grabs your heart and stomps on it,” he said, “a painting that you cannot not have, if you can afford it. So I try to do that. I try to buy the things that grab me. But not everything is 100%. Sometimes you have a 50% reaction, and sometimes it’s the technique or some other message that comes across. With some of these early Modernist things, the attraction was simply that the artists were early Modernists. I liked the fact that they were there. Morton Schamberg, for example. Some of his stuff to me is just wonderful, but nobody knows who he is.”

Schamberg’s 1911 “Self-Portrait” and “Geometrical Patterns 1913,” a chunky, abstract back view of a figure, are in the show. So are paintings by other obscure artists, including Alexander Brook, Jared French, Bernard Perlin and Niles Spencer. But there are plenty of big names as well: Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Grant Wood.

“You can’t use this,” Kunin said each time he digressed into an unprintable anecdote. But losing the censored material doesn’t dilute the narrative of a collector who never tiptoes around aesthetic fine points or indulges in the opaque language-to-the-trade known as artspeak.

“I like nudes,” he said of Arthur B. Carles’ 1921 “Nude Reclining,” a dramatic portrayal of a seductive woman on a swath of red drapery. “It’s very comforting to have them around. They are sculptural, like the hills of Arkansas.” Bare breasts in other paintings elicit appreciative comments from Kunin; so does the oversized “haunch” of the artistically ill-proportioned woman in Milton Avery’s 1940 “Seated Nude.” As for the figure depicted in “Weeping Negro,” a 1934 painting by Pavel Tchelitchew: “It looks like his head is exploding.”

Pictures such as these drew Armstrong to Kunin’s collection in 1981, when she was writing her doctoral thesis on Paul Cadmus, a satirical realist represented in the show by a self-portrait and a raucous street scene, “Aspects of Suburban Life: Main Street.” She returned frequently over the next 15 years, while she was a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Since moving to California in 1996, Armstrong has kept in touch with Kunin and his wife, Anita, who have a second home in Laguna Beach.

The collection brings a steady stream of other curators, museum directors, scholars and collectors to the corporate offices of Regis Corp., where most of the artworks are installed. But some visitors -- including John Walsh, director emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum -- are shocked by what they find.

“You’re in an office park by the freeway somewhere on the outskirts of Minneapolis,” Walsh wrote in an e-mail, recalling his visit to the collection. “It’s an ordinary-looking corporate headquarters, and in the elevator your heart is sinking a little. But when the door opens you see paintings in the corridors and in every office and secretarial cubby. Homer, Hartley, Dove, O’Keeffe -- all the gods of American modern art before World War II -- hundreds of them. And many terrific painters I’d never heard of. Eight floors! Just dazzling! And unusual choices, like self-portraits by Stuart Davis, many, many still lifes, and monochrome paintings by artists you didn’t realize had made them.

“It’s a collection any museum would kill for. Kunin is in a league with the late William Lane in Boston, who bought these artists while they were still cheap, and Barney Ebsworth in Seattle, whose collection is a lot smaller. Kunin is a passionate guy. He has great instincts, knowledge and a kind of contrarian taste. He likes surprises. And he’s collecting for love, not money or status.”

Space to fill

The son of Paul and Florence Kunin, who established Kunin Beauty Salon in 1922 and expanded it into a chain of department-store salons, Myron Kunin bought the company in 1958 and changed its name to Regis. The corporation doesn’t own the art displayed at its headquarters; Kunin transferred it to a privately held company, Curtis Galleries, in 1991, when Regis went public. But he credits much of his acquisitive energy to Regis’ wall space.

“This wasn’t a business I wanted to be in,” Kunin said, “partly because it was my father’s business and we didn’t get along very well. But he sold it to me and I was trapped. You know, you have a truck and you run it. The side benefit to me, when I got into art, was that I could decorate the building. Regis has grown an awful lot, much of it after I ceased to be CEO and became chairman and then vice chairman. It was a challenge to keep up with their expansion. The main building, where most of this stuff is, has 110,000 square feet, so there are lots of walls. The building is designed so that you can see into everybody’s office. There is no privacy whatsoever. I got to decorate all the space, and that kind of spurred me on.”

He did it his way -- picking the brains of dealers and buying what he liked -- but praise from the art world establishment means a lot to him.

“I’m like any pretty girl. I love to be complimented,” Kunin said. “It’s easy to be seduced by people who really like what you are doing.” With no formal education in art, he has gained considerable knowledge of American Modernism and ventured into other territory, including photography, English painting and African art.

“I’m not a good reader,” he said. “I’m a good picture-looker.”

Nonetheless, he tracks his collecting to a book on American painting by Barbara Rose that he encountered in the late 1970s.

“I got the names of the Ashcan artists,” Kunin said, “and came across a gallery in Chicago where I bought a few pieces, including a little tiny sketch of a nude by Robert Henri that cost about $1,500.” He sold the sketch many years later for less than he paid. But another early purchase, Henri’s 1915 painting “Edna Smith,” depicting a red-haired young woman with her clothes pulled down below the waist, remains a favorite.

“Then I bought a George Luks portrait, ‘Woman at the Opera,’ at auction,” he said. “I never believed it was entirely Luks because it’s so beautifully painted; his later things became kind of slapdash. But no one has told me it isn’t a Luks. That purchase got me into the auction market 25 years ago, for about 5,000 bucks. In today’s world you can’t buy a major painting for that.”

The art of the acquisition

Kunin hasn’t shied away from paying big prices at auction, however. In 1994 he bought Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s “Conception Synchromy” for $360,000 and Hartley’s “Madawaska: Acadian Light-Heavy” for $662,5000. He also bagged two other Hartley paintings at auction, paying $376,500 for “Pitcher with Calla Lilies” in 1997 and $1.65 million, a record price for the artist, for “A Nice Time” in 1999.

“Roberto,” a portrait of a male clown by Walt Kuhn -- which Armstrong ranks among the most compelling images in the show -- was also an auction purchase. Kunin bought it in 2001 for a record $1.1 million, three times the presale estimate established by the auction house.

“I chase the painting, not the price,” Kunin said. “If it’s in an auction, I’ll try to get it. But it’s more fun to deal with galleries. I love the contest of an auction, but when you are dealing with a gallery there’s a human being you can talk to. You can’t help but learn, but you’ve got to find a way to get dealers to pay attention to you without spending money. They pay a lot of attention if you are going to buy a $100,000 painting. The trick is to learn starting on a zero base and get them to talk to you. Most of my knowledge comes from gallery owners who spend time with me.”

Among them is Lawrence Salander of Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in New York.

“One of the happiest days of my life was when Myron Kunin waltzed into my gallery,” Salander said, “and that has nothing to do with money. His taste is unbelievable. He’s way ahead of everyone else. He loves the art in such a pure way and he has such a generosity of spirit.”

That a small museum in Southern California is hosting the first exhibition of Kunin’s collection and publishing the first catalog on it doesn’t surprise Salander.

“That’s like him,” the dealer said. “He shares his art, but he isn’t interested in showing off.” The exhibition will travel to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in Kunin’s hometown, and probably to another, to-be-determined location.

“People ask me how I have done this,” Kunin said of his collecting prowess. “It takes time. I’ve been playing around with this stuff for 25 or 30 years. You have to spend a lot of time beating the streets of New York and in the galleries that carry the things that interest you, but it has been very rewarding.

“Part of the fun is the contest,” he said. “I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a deal maker. Each painting you buy is a deal. I love the negotiation. I like the people very much. So it became a whole way of life for me that was fascinating, and I still love it. It’s more important to me than business. I never wanted to be in that business anyway. But it allowed me to do this.”

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‘Villa America: American Moderns, 1900-1950’

Where: Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays and until 8 p.m. Thursdays; closed Mondays

Ends: Oct. 2

Price: $8 to $10

Contact: (949) 759-1122; www.ocma.net