Wild Art

Garbed improbably but characteristically in a worn denim shirt and a faded trucker’s cap, Rene di Rosa is apologizing for his faltering memory.

We are in the main room of the gray stone house that was his residence for the better part of 30 years. There is scarcely a square foot of wall that isn’t covered by a large framed canvas, or a patch of hardwood floor unoccupied by a free-standing sculpture--pieces from a remarkable personal collection of mostly Bay Area artists that numbers more than 2,000 works and that he opened to public view in 1997.

“Once upon a time I could tell you the artist who did this or that, and his wife, and maybe his dog’s name,” Di Rosa says. “Now I can’t remember the artist’s name.” If pressed for the year or circumstances of a particular acquisition, he says regretfully, he might have to pass. He shakes his head. “Gadzooks!”

The nonprofit Di Rosa Preserve: Art & Nature is one of California’s overlooked treasures. While crowds jostle for tickets to synthetic exhibitions such as LACMA’s King Tut show, the preserve remains the treasured secret of the few thousand visitors who find their way each year to its hillside location in the Carneros district of Napa County: three gallery buildings, including the old residence, a meadow dotted with numerous outdoor installations and a man-made lake, all spread over 217 acres that Di Rosa retained after selling most of the surrounding vineyard for a record price in 1986.

After passing through an inconspicuous gate on a busy thoroughfare connecting Napa and San Francisco, one finds a democratic, catholic and highly individual collection--the product of a near absolute confluence of Di Rosa’s personal taste and the currents emerging in Bay Area art circles when he began collecting in earnest in the early 1960s. Like the region’s artists, Di Rosa harbored a powerful preference for maximalism over minimalism, for figuration rather than Abstract Expressionism, for color and wit, and for a seditiously neo-Dadaist critique of society, regionalism and the conventions of modern art itself.

He hadn’t planned to create a world-class collection of California modern art when he started buying from the young painters and sculptors he encountered on his solitary visits to art institutes and university studios, he explains. He was just trying to please himself, and the rest just happened.

“We filled up this room, and then the bedroom and the bath, and finally we went downstairs and then back here and up.” The 86-year-old collector casts a glance at the vaulted ceiling, from which a dozen huge canvases peer down, suspended on hooks. “I couldn’t stop.”

But as perfect a match as the collection is to its bucolic setting, the preserve is facing a period of uncertainty and change. It now is supervised by a board of directors of which Di Rosa is the chairman, but which includes local artists, philanthropists and other luminaries. Although Di Rosa still visits art institutes and galleries searching for artists waiting to be discovered, he has ceded management of the collection to a staff of curators and other professionals. They are beginning to consider, very gingerly, how to manage the collection apres Rene.

The fortunes of similarly idiosyncratic art collections, following their founders’ passings, have been checkered. Consider the baleful destiny of the world-class Barnes collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art, which was established in the homey environment of a suburban Philadelphia mansion designed as an anti-museum by its founder, a patent medicine tycoon, in 1925. Its visitors incited hostility among the tourist-averse rural neighbors, and its endowment was squandered by later generations of trustees. The collection last year was permitted to relocate to a tourist-friendly downtown location by a judge, violating the founder’s express wishes.

For every Barnes, however, there is a counter-example--Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a collection of Titians, Botticellis and other continental masters that has been embraced by its community and left largely unchanged since it was opened in 1903.

The Di Rosa board seems determined to keep the collection in place, but whether it will continue to acquire pieces for the collection--perhaps finding a formula that honors Di Rosa’s aesthetic--is under discussion. “The changeover of responsibility and power is just beginning,” says William Allan, a prominent Bay Area artist and longtime friend of the collector who serves on the board. “The nature of the collection is Rene’s spirit, but that’s a one-person operation. I don’t see how that can be perpetuated.”

Adds Richard Reisman, a retired San Francisco lawyer and fellow collector who spent 18 years as the collection’s curator--a seemingly odd title for someone tending such an individualistic enterprise: “I’d be disappointed to see some sort of committee forming, trying to pretend that they’re Rene. But the flip side is the danger of having the collection frozen in time.”

Rene di Rosa rene was an only child, his mother the descendant of St. Louis tycoons and his father an Italian diplomat. After graduating from Yale and serving in the Navy in World War II, he settled briefly in Paris. There he haunted coffee shops with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and attempted to write the Great American Novel.

“But I realized the novel was really about me,” he says. “And I wasn’t sure where the hell I was going, and Paris wasn’t a solution. I was living the novel and not writing it.”

Soon he decamped to San Francisco, which he had visited during the war, and took a reporting job at the Chronicle. But city life didn’t suit him, and he spent a modest inheritance from his father on a 460-acre spread in the Carneros district of southern Napa in 1960. There he resolved, against all professional advice, to plant grapes.

Grapes hadn’t been grown in the cool, misty climate of Carneros for nearly a century. Di Rosa’s rocky parcel, which featured a pond and a gutted and roofless stone house, had long since been turned over to cattle ranching and truck farming. He dredged the pond and conditioned the soil to accept Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vines, and enrolled in viticulture courses at UC Davis to bone up on the latest in agricultural science.

Chafing at the academic routine, he gravitated to the art department, where the faculty included several members of the Bay Area’s newly emergent “funk” school, including artist William T. Wiley and the late ceramicist Robert Arneson. (The indefinable term, which was derived from the title of a seminal 1967 exhibition in Berkeley and was never fully embraced by all of the artists, hinted at links to the Beat movement, the ‘60s counterculture and a rejection of established forms and styles elsewhere in the country.)

“The lack of critical attention of any significance here and even the lack of local support led to a spirit of anything goes,” recalls Wiley, whose work was among the earliest that Di Rosa acquired. “This area always has been an incubator for all kinds of dissent--intellectual, visual, religious, whatever. The art of the area is in that spirit.”

It was a spirit that spoke directly to Di Rosa’s heart. “I would never describe Rene as a connoisseur in the sense of someone who bases a purchase on research or historical considerations,” Reisman says. “He developed his own eye and he bought what he liked.”

That included early pieces from artists who would later stand among California’s most gifted. The collection includes 41 pieces by Arneson, many of them acerbically witty self-portraits, 97 by Wiley and 82 by the mixed-media artist David Best--including the iconic “Rhinocar,” a 1976 Oldsmobile encrusted with thousands of found objects such as clocks, bath toys, bottle caps and the head of the eponymous beast that Best created during a 1985 event at the Temporary Contemporary in Los Angeles. Still roadworthy, it was then driven to Napa, no doubt shedding a few parts along the way.

Di Rosa was unlike any other collector these artists had encountered, his judgment uninflected by the usual considerations of theory, convention, fashion, one-upmanship or interior decor. What motivated him was his own emotional response to the art. “Unlike most people who walk into a studio, he would react to what was going on,” says Bay Area painter and sculptor Robert Hudson. “Sometimes he would come in and just start crying.”

They viewed him not as a client or customer, but as a colleague. “In my mind, he was no different from an artist,” Allan says. “He gave us the same encouragement we gave each other.” He could also be a hard bargainer--$1,000 or $2,000 was often out of his range. (“This was all done very inexpensively,” Di Rosa confides, waving his hand to encompass the works crowding the residence.)

Di Rosa would invite the artists to mix with his acquaintances from other walks of life, often at dinners over which he presided like a ringmaster. “It was a little bit more than friendly chat,” recalls Wiley, who adds that Di Rosa would often use his latest acquisition as a conversational goad. “He might say, ‘What do you think of this piece here?’ You’d reply, ‘It’s, well . . . interesting,’ as people do, and he’d go, ‘Interesting! What does that mean?’ There were no easy escapes. It was about people having to say what they thought or what they believed.”

No one would deny that the quality of the works in the collection varies--”eclectic” is the term often employed by those trying to account kindly for its range--but the highlights are numerous and remarkable. “Every time I go up there I’m knocked out by something,” Wiley says. “Every now and then I see a piece that just blows me away.”

Di Rosa was thrilled by the opportunity to nurture young, undiscovered talent, but he did this, like everything else, in his own way. The San Francisco conceptual artist Paul Kos, now 62, made the first sale of his career to Di Rosa, who then helped Kos make ends meet by giving him a job as a farmhand in his vineyard--and also commissioned an outdoor artwork for the lake, paying him the same scale for the artwork as for the farm labor ($1.25 a day and a can of cola). “He did that for a lot of artists,” Kos says. “They’d go out there and say, ‘I’m a painter,’ and he’d say, ‘Great, the barn needs painting.’ ” While they labored he would take their measure as professional artists, and in the end, Kos says, “he’d buy a piece from them, too.”

Kos eventually produced what became one of the collection’s signature pieces. This is “Chartres Bleu,” an array of 27 video monitors each displaying by DVD one pane of a stained-glass window from Chartres Cathedral, with the 12-hour wax and wane of sunlight behind the glass compressed into a 12-minute time span. Initially conceived as a response to the breakneck editing of video-inspired art of the ‘80s, the work showed at galleries around the country until Di Rosa bought it in the mid-1990s. He was planning a tunnel connecting the house to a separate gallery building, and decided instead to turn the tunnel into a permanent home for the work--a darkened concrete room furnished with pew-like wooden chairs, where visitors are encouraged to spend a few minutes contemplating what turned into a lovely and moody commentary on the evolution of artistic technique over the centuries.

As the collection grew, the vineyard also thrived. Under the name Winery Lake, Di Rosa’s Carneros tract produced some of the most sought-after grapes in the state, acquiring enough cachet to appear on Napa wine labels as an appellation unto itself. In 1986, he sold the vineyard to Seagram & Sons, the owner of Sterling Vineyards in northern Napa, for a reported $8.5 million--a record per-acre price at the time.

His third wife, Veronica, a Canadian sculptor and painter, had helped formulate the idea of placing the collection on public display; the Seagram deal left them more than 200 acres, the house and the lake, as well as the capital to erect two new gallery buildings. In 1991, as the project was taking shape, Veronica died in a hiking accident in France. Di Rosa turned the preserve into a memorial to his late wife.

Yet for all that, it is Rene Di Rosa’s personality that permeates the exhibit spaces--not only through the individualism of the collection, but through the absence of identifying labels on the walls.

During his own museum visits, Di Rosa says, “I’d see people glance at a picture and then study who did it, when it was done, who gave it, all that crap. I decided I wanted them to look at what was inside the picture frame, not what’s written beside the picture frame.”

He also was determined to insulate his visitors from the stuffy didacticism of formal art exhibitions, just as he had insulated himself from the “experts.” “When you walk into a museum and see all that blah-blah on the wall, the subtext seems to be, ‘You can’t negotiate this without our help,’ ” he observed in the preface to “Local Color,” a 1999 catalog of the preserve. “People bring their own baggage to the viewing experience. We invite them to open that baggage and participate in the conversation between themselves and the art.”

At the preserve, the sensation is at first disorienting and ultimately liberating. Deprived of the signposts that allow a visitor to place a museum piece into the usual manufactured context, one has to confront every image or construction on its own terms and in its immediate setting. In some galleries the air crackles with a wordless discussion of image, figure, color, materials and medium. One recollects a visit to the Di Rosa Preserve less by summoning up the titles of works or the artists’ names than by re-imagining the colors, shapes, figures and arrangements. (For those hungering for the specifics, a loose-leaf binder is placed inconspicuously in the corner of each gallery, keying the titles and artists to catalog numbers placed by each piece or to a schematic of the gallery floor.)

Occasionally a group riding the preserve’s rickety tram between the gatehouse and the main galleries on the hillside will pass Rene di Rosa on his daily shamble down the hill to collect his mail. He’ll wave and shout as they pass by: “Enjoy the art!” He seldom visits the collection, even in the house where the first pieces were hung.

That’s where I met with him one afternoon, in the art-crammed room where he used to preside over his salons. This part of the collection, the curators say, will be kept almost exactly as it was when the Di Rosas lived there, down to the stack of jazz LPs piled next to an old phonograph. The collector’s gait is slowed by age, his voice hoarsened, his aquiline nose more pronounced. One still sees in his expression the antic iconoclast who, in a neo-Dadaist vein, once appeared at a Napa land development protest wearing a gorilla suit. (The collection includes a 1988 photograph by the portraitist Jock McDonald, Veronica’s son, featuring Di Rosa and the gorilla head grimacing at one another.)

He ambles around the room as he talks, stopping at pieces that catch his eye. If there’s a positive aspect to his fading memory it’s that it allows him to rediscover some of the works as on first sight, to enjoy again the visceral response that provoked him to buy them in the first place.

“Would I acquire all these again?” he asks himself out loud. “Probably.” He halts before a free-standing work by Hudson. Entitled “Balance Point,” it’s a multicolored stabile with sinewy appendages terminating in points and antler-like horns.

“I like art that touches me,” he says, touching it in return by extending a bony index finger to set a free-spinning part of it twirling.

“I didn’t have much of a problem making a fairly rapid decision on most of these,” he says. “Although . . . “ His circuit has brought him around to a large oil that is almost entirely black, except for a splotch of color at one corner. It’s “Core,” a 1990 piece by abstract artist Mike Henderson. He ponders it at length. “I can look at this piece and say, ‘I really must have taken a long time to settle on it.’ ”

“What makes you think that?” I ask.

“The colors are . . . extremely subdued,” he replies. “And it isn’t a human figure.”

But it’s rare that any part of his collection leaves him so stymied, for the collection and the man are largely indistinguishable. “It’s the manifestation of a single vision,” Reisman, the former curator, says, “and he is revealed through the collection.”

But that, obviously, is not a condition that will last forever. The preserve has begun to supplement Di Rosa’s endowment of artwork, property and cash, which was valued at more than $12 million in 2003 (the art is overdue for a new appraisal), with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and other organizations and foundations. The curatorial staff bears the kind of professional and academic credentials that Di Rosa once abjured, but he’s now less doctrinaire about such things than he used to be.

“I assume they know what they’re doing,” he says. “Certainly as people with university backgrounds, they don’t agree with all the art that I acquired, but they’re polite about it. Anyway, I don’t know where they could go to find somebody that collected exactly the same way they would.”

Known for boasting that he never sold a single piece of art, he’s more concerned now that the collection be self-sustaining, even if that means placing the occasional superfluous piece on the market in order to pick up something new. “I’m very upset that the preserve isn’t financially able to exist without dipping into the endowment I set up,” he says. “It wouldn’t bother me if they sold a piece, someone we don’t need that many of.”

A new executive director, Kathryn Reasoner, the former executive director of the Headlands Center for the Arts, a Marin artists’ colony, is assuming the same post this month at the preserve, but the board already made some changes in its operations. One of the main galleries is now partly given over to a space for curated exhibits that relate to and amplify the collection’s distinctive character. The current show, running through Oct. 1, is devoted to “found art” fashioned from the flotsam and jetsam of modern life--a medium encountered in pieces such as David Best’s decorated cars. Entitled, unsurprisingly, “Found,” it combines outside pieces with star items from the collection.

Looming over discussions of the future is the ever-present issue of resources. Until recently, Napa County regulations designed to protect the treasured local vineyards allowed visits to the preserve only by appointment, with groups limited to 25 people each. Starting this year, the preserve has operated under relaxed rules: One gallery is open to walk-in visitors from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. four days a week. (Full details about the operation are available at www.dirosapreserve.org.) Taken together, the restrictions mean that the maximum attendance per year only can be about 20,000 people. Given the congestion on the main highway feeding the preserve’s sole entrance, it may be difficult to persuade the authorities to loosen the reins much further.

Board members talk about establishing educational programs and reaching out beyond the region, as was done last year through a traveling show of the collection that received good notices from as far afield as Washington, D.C. But one of the collection’s distinguishing features is its integration with its setting. It’s a combination of art and nature that deserves--no, demands--to become better known as a treasure of California culture unlike anything else under the sun.