THE ART COLLECTION

General Articles

"Standing Nude" by Nicolas Granger-Taylor

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May 12, 1991, Sunday, Home Edition

Calendar; Page 6; Calendar Desk

Barbara Isenberg

No doubt about it.

In Hollywood, art is the scene. It's what industry people discuss over pasta checca and seared ahi. It represents beauty, wealth, passion, power, culture, status and celebrity. It's about deal-making and high-rolling. The players are glamorous. So is the game.

From Fran and Ray Stark's museum-like sculpture garden to the beginning photography and print collections of young agents and producers, movie and TV people are involved in the art world as never before.

Many contemporary art dealers here estimate that entertainment industry people represent at least 25% of their buyers. Santa Monica-based Fred Hoffman says his gallery alone has done business with more than 100 people in the entertainment businessthe last two years.

"Where there is affluence, some level of leisure time and the motivation for extending one's perception, it's a normal process to get involved with art," says New York dealer Arnold Glimcher. "People in film and the dramatic arts in New York are also involved in collecting. Artists stick together."

They have the money, often paint or sculpt themselves, enjoy the social cachet and hedge against future unemployment. Advisers and dealers line up to provide advice, and their lawyers often buy from the same people. And if you're going to keep an eye on your investments and financial future, it's probably more fun to talk art with dealers and artists at DC-3 or 72 Market Street than to invest in stock or real estate deals.

Celebrity art collectors regularly join insurance, retailing and banking executives on Art and Antiques' annual list of the 100 top U.S. collectors. This year's list, published in March, listed Diandra (Mrs. Michael) Douglas, Madonna, Steve Martin, Andy Williams, Oprah Winfrey, super-agent Michael Ovitz, and producers Douglas Cramer, Joel Silver and Ray Stark. (Bill Cosby, David Geffen and Barbra Streisand are such regulars that the magazine even explained why they weren't on this year's list.)

Because many of these people keep low profiles outside their immediate circles, nobody knows for certain how many collectors wear down paths between the studio and gallery rows on Colorado Boulevard in Santa Monica or 57th Street in New York. But interviews with dozens of collectors, dealers, artists and others indicate between 20 and 30 important, multimillion dollar collections -- and hundreds of smaller ones -- are being amassed locally by industry patrons.

'It's a company town," says artist De Wain Valentine, "and the movie business is our company."

About 25% of the lenders to the County Museum of Art's coming exhibition, "Monet to Matisse: French Art in Southern California Collections," are somehow connected to the entertainment industry, says the show's co-curator, Judi Freeman. Elizabeth Taylor is lending her Van Gogh, Stark's Monet painting is on the catalogue's front cover and songwriter Billy Steinberg's Matisse vase is on the back cover.

Stark, Geffen, Martin and producer David Wolper are all on the County Museum of Art board; all have made or promised gifts to the museum, while Martin and Geffen have each contributed enough money (about $250,000) to have galleries named after them. TV producer Douglas Cramer is currently president of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and last week Ovitz hosted a major MOCA fund-raiser at Creative Artists Agency.

"Without the industry, MOCA would have had trouble coming into existence," says the museum's director, Richard Koshalek.

"No doubt about it."

Art collecting is becoming the thing to do. Nearly half of the people listed in ARTnews' 1991 roster of the top 200 collectors weren't actively collecting in 1980. Maurice Tuchman, senior curator of 20th-Century art at the County Museum, estimates there are probably 20 times as many collectors in America today as 20 years ago.

Many of them are in Southern California, where industry interest has both profited from and contributed to the city's recognition in the '80s as an international art center. Besides the presence of the J. Paul Getty Museum and Norton Simon Museum heralding art of the past, contemporary art has come of age here. Collectors and dealers alike point to the founding of MOCA, the expansion of the County Museum of Art, a gallery boom.

"I think it coincides with their spiritual ideology," says consultant Molly Barnes, who helped put together collections for producer Norman Lear and others. "The museum and gallery have replaced the church as a place for people to meet, mate and date. They look to art for spiritual answers as well as a way to express themselves and be in."

Edward G. Robinson spent Matisse's 70th birthday with him in Paris, and so do today's top collectors mix with today's art stars. Roy Lichtenstein, for instance, says he "almost always" socializes with industry people when he's in town. Producers and agents regularly entertain prominent New York-based artists and dealers at their homes or trendy restaurants, while local dealers cater elegant meals in the intimacy of their galleries.

"The artists are as interested in TV and movie stars as the other way around, which I find is very healthy and fun to mesh," says producer Cramer.

Robert Rauschenberg and Gregory Peck met at a screening at Norman Lear's house not long ago, for instance, and Peck later stopped by Gemini G.E.L. to watch the artist create new prints. "It was nice for both of them," says Gemini co-founder Sid Felsen. "I think Bob was thrilled that Gregory Peck was here watching him, and I think Gregory Peck enjoyed watching Bob work."

TV executive and art collector Scott Spiegel's memorial service was at Hoffman's gallery, and dealer Irving Blum's recent wedding reception was at the home of Arthur Cohen, president of worldwide marketing for Paramount Pictures. Glimcher, whose influence here has ranged from Wolper's Picasso sculptures to Ovitz's modern art collection, has gone on to first produce ("Legal Eagles" and "Gorillas in the Mist") and now direct films ("The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love").

It only makes sense that the worlds mingle, says sculptor Robert Graham, whose work is in many industry collections and who is currently dating Anjelica Huston. "When you meet people, you gravitate toward those who are like you, who have the same struggles. The medium you use to manifest your vision is different but the struggle is the same."

Publicly, their worlds intersect at charity art auctions, Hollywood parties and big-ticket art events. The premiere of Martin's film, "L.A. Story," was the first joint fund-raiser of MOCA and LACMA and attracted such performers as Cybill Shepherd, Michael Douglas and Tom Hanks. There were 1,200 people at the premiere, and each museum went home with $50,000. "They're involved with the scene in a way older collectors in the industry never were," says curator Tuchman. "They identify with artists and the art world and commerce and risk; this is a story being told before their eyes."

Steve Martin has called paintings "the last luxury" and "an intellectual harem," and many buyers simply relish being surrounded by beauty and creativity. Tony Curtis speaks of the pleasure of standing in front of a great painting, in the very same arc of space where the artist stood, for instance. And the late Barry Lowen, a TV executive who inspired many of today's collectors, would keep blocking off windows in his Hollywood home to have more wall space for his art.

It's a far cry from Dusty, the rock star in Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters," who has "a lot of wall space" in his new, huge house in Southampton. Stopping by a SoHo studio, fabulously wealthy Dusty declines to look at drawings because he wants "something big" -- with puce in it to go with his new ottoman.

But just as with any industry, passion, commitment and motivation vary widely among Hollywood collectors. "I think with rare exceptions, they don't devote the time," says dealer Irving Blum, who runs galleries on both coasts. "I think they collect mostly for reasons of fashion. They pick up these shelter magazines and are often very influenced. They think paintings look really handsome on large white walls."

"If it's trendy to collect art, they'll collect art," says consultant Marcia Medavoy Ross. "In the early '70s, it was trendy to collect Tiffany lamps. If one person builds a screening room, everyone builds them. If you have 200 people collecting, and 30 who are serious, that's a lot."

Santa Monica dealer Michael Kohn is less diplomatic: "They want the accouterments of wealth and taste . Serious collectors go to galleries every weekend, sit on museum committees and don't just buy a lot of (art) that's supposed to be worth a lot of money. It's hard to sink in an idea of quality to people who think a good movie is one that makes $100 million."

Yet, museum curators frequently praise individuals in terms of scholarship as well as gift-giving, and Koshalek describes in-home art libraries that are well-used as well as extensive. "People who have a high profile in the industry are special targets of envy because of the surroundings of glamour," Tuchman says. "I think it's a nice change of pace for people in the industry to gossip about art rather than the revenues of the newest production."

Moreover, the "industry" may have been hit by recession, but not so badly as real estate and banking. As the art-market frenzy dies down and many buyers are more cautious, art dealers here and elsewhere are courting show business buyers as never before.

These are people who have been known to trade expensive automobiles for fine paintings. Local collectors and dealers alike report that even New York dealers who may once have dismissed industry buyers are today seriously wooing them.

Some dealers wouldn't name a celebrity buyer if their Jaguar leases depended on it, but others readily mention such things as how producer Thom Mount buys "strictly from his gut" and Bruce Springsteen is a "very nice guy" who stopped in and bought art during regular business hours. One dealer even has inscribed photographs in the gallery restroom from such people as Bruce Willis and Jodie Foster.

Connections certainly help. Marcia Medavoy Ross' ex-husband is Mike Medavoy, chairman of Tri-Star Pictures. Dealer Earl McGrath was president of Rolling Stones Records at one point, and dealer Michael Kohn, who was born and raised here, says many of his friends from school are studio VPs now. Ruth Bloom of Meyers/Bloom in Santa Monica is married to entertainment lawyer Jake Bloom.

Dealer Jeanne Meyers says, for instance, that it was attorney Bloom who introduced her and many of his colleagues to the work of Leon Polk Smith. At the gallery's recent Smith show, which closed March 30, she figures 40% of the artworks -- at prices from $6,000 for a small collage to $210,000 for a large painting from the '60s -- went to entertainment industry people.

TV and film producer Gene Corman criticizes colleagues who buy art because "somebody suggests an artist or another artist is hot." Corman, who with his wife Nan has created a highly regarded collection of modern figurative art, feels that "people should judge on their own, and it's not that difficult. When you read a book, you know instantly whether the person can write. Same with a screenplay. The words tell you the imagery and the substance. Looking at art is the same."

Maybe for Corman, who traces his interest in art back to his college days at Stanford. But others are less sure of themselves. Today's show-business people, much like today's corporate buyers, often rely on helpers. Reputation and money both are involved, which make pedigree very important. They go to well-known dealers their friends use or they have read about, and they tend to buy familiar names.

'I think everybody fears looking stupid," Blum says. "Consultants are more powerful than they've ever been because people don't want to be made to look silly and often aren't prepared to devote the time themselves that it requires."

Not that using consultants is worry-free. Sylvester Stallone sued art consultant Barbara Guggenheim for $5 million in December, 1989, saying that based on controversy surrounding a $1.8-million 19th-Century Bouguereau painting that she bought for him, he felt he paid too much for several other artworks bought through her. Both sides confirm that the suit was later dropped, and asked about the resultant bad publicity, Guggenheim says, "It comes with the territory. If you don't cross the street, you don't get run over. That was an unfortunate situation . . . but I have the highest regard for (Stallone)."

The high visibility makes celebrity buyers more subject to scrutiny, comments artist Billy Al Bengston, "and probably a little more timid in terms of making selections. If you take a nice egghead investor, he can collect anything he wants to and never get any flak for it."

Art & Antiques editor Jeffrey Schaire notes, for instance, that Oprah Winfrey bought quite a bit of Shaker furniture last August at auction "and did it very publicly. (The buying) was picked up everywhere as a piece of gossip and I think that was a mildly unpleasant experience for her."

Better to be candid about what you're doing. "I'm not a very educated collector," says Norman Lear, who has been collecting art since the '70s. "I also can't walk around and tell you what year and what period of the artist's creative life a piece of work was done in. What we have here amuses us and lifts our spirits."

Artists and studio people have been slow-dancing for years. Siqueiros painted a mural on John Huston's screening room wall, and Balthus encouraged Tony Curtis to paint.

West Hollywood dealer Patricia Faure recalls the '40s when, as a teen-ager, she worked as a volunteer with Vincent Price, a founder of Beverly Hills' Modern Institute of Art and a key influence on art connoisseurship among his colleagues. Edward G. Robinson showed his collection of Impressionist and other masterworks at the County Museum of Art in 1956.

Ray Stark's mother-in-law Fanny Brice collected art, and brother-in-law William Brice creates it; there are Brice paintings hanging alongside the Matisses and Diebenkorns throughout the house. Stark first became friendly with Henry Moore when "Funny Girl" was opening in London, and says that Moore interested the Starks in other sculptors.

Robinson sold most of his holdings because of a divorce settlement. And over the years, such important industry-based collections as those of Hal Wallis, Billy Wilder, and Edie Mayer Goetz and her husband, producer William Goetz, have raised millions of dollars at auction.

But collecting is addictive. Wilder's collection of Impressionist and 20th-Century art may have fetched $32.6 million at Christie's in 1989, for instance, but the award-winning producer-director is still buying art.

Wilder, who once said "I wish I'd collected more and directed less," recently attended an opening at Gemini. There were four new Roy Lichtenstein prints on the gallery walls upstairs and four on the first floor, and Wilder loved every one of them. So when he couldn't decide which of Lichtenstein's "Interiors" to buy -- for prices starting at $25,000 apiece -- he bought all eight of them.

Dealers and collectors continually refer to a group of influential, well-known industry buyers like Wilder as "centers of influence." Actor Curtis recalls learning about artists from Wilder, and Steve Martin has been quoted as tipping his hat to Andy Williams. Actor/director/artist Dennis Hopper bridges the art scenes of the '60s and the '90s.

Perhaps the key "center of influence" in the '80s was Barry Lowen, vice president for creative affairs at Aaron Spelling Productions until his death in 1985. From Cramer and Ovitz to new, younger collectors, serious buyers nearly always mention Lowen's name. Before he died and his contemporary art collection was left to MOCA, Lowen's art-engulfed Hollywood Hills home was a must visit for his colleagues and others.

Lowen was also a founder in 1985 of the Entertainment Alliance unit of the Modern and Contemporary Art Council support group at the County Museum of Art, an entity that has since all but disappeared. Maurice Tuchman blames its demise in part on the industry's odd hours and irregular schedules, but he does not seem discouraged. "Now the numbers are such that they offer a venturesomeness and collegiality," Tuchman says. "There's a sense of community arising for the first time."

What do they buy?

Purchases vary from collector to collector, but Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella seem as popular today as they were in the '70s. Fewer people these days can afford to buy the Impressionists, but many people in Hollywood own work by David Hockney, Franz Kline and Alexander Calder. They own works by Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Ellsworth Kelly, Jonathan Borofsky, Joel Shapiro and Bruce Nauman.

Everybody who can afford it has at least one work by Eric Fischl, David Salle or Julian Schnabel, the "hot" artists of the '80s. And both Madonna and Jack Nicholson reportedly collect Tamara de Lempicka -- the artist institutionalized by the play "Tamara" -- in addition to other work.

Such Los Angeles-based artists as Ed Ruscha, Laddie John Dill, John Baldessari, Charles Arnoldi, Valentine and Graham often appear in these collections, but the emphasis remains on New York artists. Says Billy Al Bengston: "If I had to depend on the movie industry, I'd sure be up a creek."

Madonna, who has been quoted saying she began collecting art "as soon as I had the bread," has not only bought paintings by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo but also commissioned a screenplay about her. Consultant Guggenheim says she seeks out social-realist paintings for one producer, paintings with very strong points of view or specialized lighting for a director client.

Producer Daniel Melnick, she says, collects "cool, minimalist paintings and works by young abstract painters working off that tradition," while Stallone, she says, looks for "heroic" figures in his art, whether in Old Masters or more contemporary work.

Industry people tend to concentrate on particular artists or periods, says Sandra Starr, director of the James Corcoran Gallery, "and I think this is one of the reasons they tend to end up having very good collections. Possibly because they don't have a lot of time, they tend to be very intense and that kind of intensity (can) produce very good collections."

Producer David Wolper, for instance, stalked Picasso sculpture; in the bar of the Plaza Athenee in Paris, he and Glimcher looked through books together at potential purchases, then set out to buy them. That was in 1980, and by 1984, Wolper had amassed so many that when the County Museum of Art exhibited "David L. Wolper's Picassos," the collection represented the largest group of Picasso sculpture then in private hands.

Like people in other businesses who buy art, some collectors can't wait to talk about it. Walking a visitor through their collections, they toss off the provenance of their artworks, peppering their conversation with phrases like "lucky to get it" and "don't make me sound pretentious." They note which of their paintings have been featured in art magazines, and are quick to send along glossy photo spreads from Architectural Record.

Producer Joel Silver ("Die Hard" and "Lethal Weapon"), who generally refuses to talk to the press, readily chats about his passion for Frank Lloyd Wright houses -- he's been living in Wright's 2,500-square-foot Storer house in the Hollywood Hills since '84 and has been working on the Auldbrass Plantation in South Carolina since purchasing it in 1986. Silver even sets up a walk-through of his home for the reporter.

The tour is led by dealer Tod Volpe, who estimates that the entertainment industry could account for half of the Arts and Crafts business here generally. Volpe helped producer Silver locate and buy furniture and decorative art pieces for his Wright-designed homes, then went on to work with many of Silver's friends and colleagues. Art adviser to such heavyweights as Larry Gordon ("Field of Dreams") and actors Nicholson, Streisand and Willis, Volpe left behind his Madison Avenue gallery and headed West to cultivate a market here.

Creative Artists Agency chairman Michael Ovitz also shies away from discussing his personal art collection, preferring to talk about his new corporate headquarters. The I.M. Pei building "was built to be a piece of art itself," says Ovitz, who also commissioned Roy Lichtenstein to create a monumental 26-foot-high painting on-site.

While Ovitz's contemporary desk reflects the curves and style of Pei's building, the rest of the office reflects his eclectic collecting style. A book about Pei rests on a Noguchi table not far from a minimalist Robert Mangold painting; there are Giacometti chairs, turn-of-the-century African sculpture, a Japanese woodblock, a Miro sculpture and Chinese silk fabrics.

Ovitz and other well-heeled collectors generally make many of their purchases in New York and observers guess show business people are buying as much -- if not more -- in New York as here. Most of these people are bi-coastal, and those who don't have homes in both cities still regularly visit New York. They travel SoHo galleries on Saturdays, hit the 57th Street galleries during the week. Cramer is on the Museum of Modern Art's international council, and Ovitz is on MOMA's high-level Chairman's Council and was recently named to the museum's Trustee Committee on Film.

What about future buying by the industry? Agents David and Bob Gersh grew up in a house filled with fine art by their parents, Beatrice and Phil Gersh, and are building their own impressive collections. Young stars and producers are growing accustomed to seeing good art on the walls of their agents' and lawyers' homes and offices. Is it making an impression?

Maybe so. Industry buyers scooped up John Alexander's paintings, for instance, in recent shows at Jan Turner's and Earl McGrath's galleries. Alexander "happens to know a lot of people in the industry," says Turner, who sold nearly half of Alexander's $22,000 to $40,000 paintings to industry people "in this so-called slow period." Among the buyers, says Turner, were "China Beach's" Dana Delany and Robin Williams.

Music supervisor Joe Jarrell, 27, talks about one day buying art from Thomas Solomon, who has been selling "cutting edge" art from assorted garage-based galleries locally since the fall of 1988. (Solomon used the pool at director Paul Mazursky's house a few years ago for a Christmas exhibition of waterproof art.) "People in the entertainment industry are interested in art that doesn't hit you over the head," Solomon says. "They're educated, go to museums, read art magazines, and are interested in art history."

Many younger people are also buying photographs, which are often less intimidating, less money comparatively, and more familiar to movie people than other art forms. Photography dealer David Fahey estimates that at least 30% of Fahey/Klein's customers are in the industry, and says such people bought half the photographs in last fall's Irving Penn show -- at $1,500 to $20,000 apiece.

"People in arts-related industries tend to be in the avant-garde and are more forward thinking," Fahey says. "Even collecting classical photography has only been very popular the past 20 years. They're catching the wave early on."

Now, dealers and artists alike are talking movies. Perhaps following in the tradition of the late Andy Warhol, artists David Salle and Robert Longo have both indicated interest in film-making. Dealer Volpe is currently developing one film on the legendary art dealer, Joseph Duveen, and another on art thefts.

Glimcher's example has obviously not gone unnoticed. The dealer/producer says arts sales have resulted from his movie contacts, and younger dealer Stuart Regen candidly pegs his involvement as an associate producer on Hemdale Pictures' "Bright Angel" to the potential of new business.

Regen, who figures half of his business is entertainment industry people, opened his gallery in West Hollywood partly because so many industry people lunched in the area. And he got involved on "Bright Angel," he says, "in part because I knew it would introduce me to people in the movie industry who may not know my gallery or may not go to galleries period."

Due at MOCA in early 1992, meanwhile, is "Art and Film," a show examining "the crossovers, coincidences and fusions" of modern art and films from 1895 to 1970. The exhibition has received funding from Warner Communications.

And producer Corman, who is active in the County Museum's Modern and Contemporary Art Council, says he recently proposed that the council put together a show of favorite artworks from industry collections as a fund-raiser. "Many people would come who might not necessarily step foot in a museum otherwise," Corman says. "It would show the community the sensibilities of people in the entertainment business."

WHO IS COLLECTING WHAT? A SAMPLER

Bill Cosby: African-American art, Shaker furniture

Douglas Cramer: contemporary masters (Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein)

Diandra and Michael Douglas: Indian art, furniture

Harrison Ford: late Impressionist (Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard)

Richard Gere: photography (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Joel Peter Witkin)

David Geffen: contemporary art (David Hockney, Sam Francis, Johns)

Larry Gordon: American Arts and Crafts and early 20th-Century American paintings

Dennis Hopper: Modern and contemporary (Marcel Duchamp, Ed Ruscha, Jean-Michel Basquiat)

Lyn and Norman Lear: contemporary paintings and sculpture (Robert Graham, Robert Rauschenberg)

Madonna: Frida Kahlo paintings, photography (early 20th-Century masters), Pablo Picasso

Steve Martin: Hockney, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler

Daniel Melnick: Emerging and contemporary (Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly)

Jack Nicholson: Impressionist and Modernist paintings and sculpture, Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau

Michael Ovitz: Modern (Picasso, Joan Miro, Jean Dubuffet) and contemporary (Lichtenstein), African art

Joel Silver: Frank Lloyd Wright houses, Teco pottery, Arts and Crafts

Steven Spielberg: Norman Rockwell, Disney cels

Sylvester Stallone: Old masters and contemporary art (Francis Bacon, Anselm Kiefer)

Fran and Ray Stark: Impressionist (Claude Monet) and modern paintings and sculpture (Aristide Maillol, Henry Moore), contemporary art

Barbra Streisand: American furniture, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Arts and Crafts

Times librarian Dorothy Ingebretsen contributed to the research in this article.

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May 10, 1990, Thursday

Pg. 23

Godfrey Barker

PALISADE by Willem de Kooning, 1957, topped Sotheby's Spring Contemporary Art Sale in New York when it sold for an under-estimate $ 7.15 million (about £4.4 million) on Tuesday night to the Chicago dealer Richard Gray. The price, something of a pale shadow of the $ 20.9 million bid, though not yet paid, by the Japanese dealer Shigeki Kameyama in November 1989 for de Kooning's Interchange of 1953, prompted speculation that the Contemporary Art market had come off the boil. That was confirmed by the failure of Sotheby's big picture of the night, de Kooning's Woman as Landscape of 1954, a key work for which $9 million-$12 million was hoped. Since prices have risen by an astonishing 2,000 per cent since 1984, a cooling down of the market, if it is now finally upon us, is a healthy sign. Sotheby's took $ 55.8 million for 83 pictures, with 31 per cent unsold. This is a high figure given the excess this market is used to; but it implies a much more judicious approach to buying than has been seen for several years. Francis Bacon's Papal Study for Portrait, 1957, fetched $ 5.5 million, and his Portrait of Lucien Freud, 1968, made $ 3.63 million. Best of the 10 artist's records set was $ 5.5 million for Cy Twombly, a leap of three times on his previous highest price, given for the 15ft long Untitled of 1971, a wall-length of doodling in white crayon on brown canvas but possessed also of a certain haunting beauty. Another, smaller Untitled of 1968, a dance of swirling circles, made a similarly low estimate of $ 3.85 million. Ambitious climbs in price were made by William Baziotes, Germaine Richier, Morris Louis, Frank Auerbach (a record $ 660,000 for his gloomy Mornington Crescent 1966), Ad Reinhardt, Larry Rivers, Donald Sultan and Richard Diebenkorn (all pushed to new highs).

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March 17, 1996, Sunday, Home edition

Calendar; Page 61; Calendar Desk

Suzanne Muchnic

If spring is just around the corner, New York's auction season can't be far away. The first indication is a preview of Sotheby's May sales, Wednesday through Saturday at the firm's Beverly Hills showroom. Among choice Impressionist and modern pieces available for viewing are two paintings by Jean Dubuffet from the estate of Lita Annenberg Hazen, wife of film producer Joseph H. Hazen and sister of publishing magnate Walter H. Annenberg. The exhibition also features a Claude Monet landscape, "Antibes, Vue du Plateau Notre Dame," and Willem Kooning's 1954-55 painting "Woman as Landscape," consigned by actor Steve Martin.

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Friday, March 15, 1996

Leah Garchik

-- ``Woman as Landscape,'' a 1954 painting by Willem de Kooning, will be auctioned at Sotheby's in New York in May, when it is expected to fetch ``several million'' dollars. The work is owned by Steve Martin, who wouldn't comment on why he is selling it.

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March 17, 1996, Sunday, Home edition

Calendar; Page 61; Calendar Desk

Suzanne Muchnic

If spring is just around the corner, New York's auction season can't be far away. The first indication is a preview of Sotheby's May sales, Wednesday through Saturday at the firm's Beverly Hills showroom. Among choice

Impressionist and modern pieces available for viewing are two paintings by Jean Dubuffet from the estate of Lita Annenberg Hazen, wife of film producer Joseph H. Hazen and sister of publishing magnate Walter H. Annenberg. The exhibition also features a Claude Monet landscape, "Antibes, Vue du Plateau Notre Dame," and Willem de Kooning's 1954-55 painting "Woman as Landscape," consigned by actor Steve Martin.

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March 16, 1996, Saturday Final AM edition

News; Pg. 20

Steve Martin, 50, says his "midlife crisis [is] in full throttle" following the recent split with girlfriend, Anne Heche, 25, and last week's marriage of ex-wife Victoria Tennant to entertainment lawyer Kirk Stambler. "I've been sorting out what it means to be a bachelor," the actor says in April's Esquire. "I've had these incredible revelations on how completely stupid I've been with women. " Says he's taken to reading Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.

 MARKINGS

Woman as Landscape, a 1954 painting by Willem de Kooning, will be auctioned at Sotheby's in New York in May, when it is expected to fetch "several million" dollars. The work is owned by Steve Martin, who wouldn't comment on why he is selling it.

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May 6, 1996, Monday

Art Sales; Pg. 14

Laura Stewart

A WOMAN rising from an abstract fiery background by Willem de Kooning leads the multimillion dollar auctions of contemporary art in New York this week. Painted in 1954-55, Woman as Landscape, estimated to fetch $6 million at Sotheby's on Wednesday evening, comes from a series painted by the Dutch abstract expressionist between 1950 and 1955. The difference here is that the monumental female figure seems more terrified than terrifying, as she appears in most others of the group.

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artnet.com Magazine News

Judd Tully

Was Sotheby's anemic $13.4 million sale of contemporary art last May 8 (against a bullish pre-sale estimate of $23 million to $31.4 million) a factor in the formation of Emmerich/Sotheby's, the just-created confection starring art-world veteran André Emmerich?

 It depends on who you talk to. "No," says Diana D. Brooks, Sotheby's president and CEO, who also navigated the lame May 8 sale that saw a trio of multimillion-dollar lots--Willem de Kooning's Woman as Landscape, Franz Kline's Andrus and Jasper John's Gray Painting With Ball--sink with barely a hand raised. "In fact, we've been talking with André since February," emphasized Brooks.

"Sotheby's is making an effort to shore up its image after the May debacle," countered one prominent private dealer who likened the alliance to Sotheby's diplomatic hiring last year of ex-Museum of Modern Art director, Richard Oldenberg, as a largely undefined ambassador-at-large. Oldenburg has a big title as chairman of Sotheby's America but has hardly made a wave since he came on board a year ago April.

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February 1, 1994, Tuesday, Home edition

Calendar; Part F; Page 3; Column 2; Entertainment Desk

Christopher Knight

Among the smaller surprises in the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art is the number of works -- including some of the best -- that come from Los Angeles collections.

 More than 15% of the show, or 14 of 91 paintings and sculptures, has been drawn from local holdings: Betty Asher, Eli and Edythe Broad, Douglas S. Cramer, David Geffen, Steve Martin, the estate of Marcia Weisman and MOCA's own Panza Collection.

 Together with two Lichtensteins from the Panza Collection not on view, and counting the great 1963 "Cold Shoulder" that is a promised gift to the County Museum of Art from Robert Halff of Beverly Hills, an estimable array of the artist's work is owned locally.

 With 12 dating from the 1960s -- capped by the great 1963 fighter-pilot canvas, "Okay, Hot-Shot!," from the Geffen collection -- those combined holdings are especially rich in paintings and sculptures from Lichtenstein's most consequential period.

 It only seems right. After all, not only are several of those collectors prominent in the entertainment industry, Los Angeles also seems an apt home for an art wittily conversant with the strange machinery of mass culture.

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February 25, 1987, Wednesday, Home edition

Calendar; Part 5; Page 2; Column 2; Entertainment Desk

Steve Martin, Barbra Streisand, oil magnate Armand Hammer and about a dozen other Los Angeles residents are listed among the country's 100 top art collectors in next month's issue of Art and Antiques magazine. Each was cited for having "a passion for art, faith in their own taste and the intelligence to trust their convictions," said a magazine spokesman. Martin collects 20th-Century American paintings, Streisand collects early American pieces and Hammer is well known for his collection of Old Masters and Impressionist art. Also making the magazine's third annual list are singer Andy Williams, businessman Frederick R. Weisman, producer David Geffen and real-estate baron Eli Broad.

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Film Notes

Friday, May 4, 2001; Page WE50

Desson Howe

 ROBERT Dornhelm's 1999 "The Venice Project" presents tales of a Venetian family in 1699, interspersed with footage from the 1999 Venice Biennale. The film starts with Count Giaccomo (Linus Roache) in 1699, who's worried about the waning of Renaissance influences. He orders his advisors to predict what will happen to the world of art in the future. Flash forward to 1999, where the Vienna Biennale is taking place. The film includes appearances by Hector Babenco, Lauren Bacall (as a certain Countess Camilla Volta), Ben Cross, Parker Posey and Dennis Hopper. John Guare, Steve Martin and others appear as themselves. A free screening of the 86-minute movie takes place Friday at 8 at the Hirshhorn. And Thursday and May 11, filmmakers Vince and Shelly Fremont will introduce "Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story," their documentary about Andy Warhol intimate Brigid Berlin. All shows are free.

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