Steve Martin's Lifelong Education in Art
By Steve Martin
 

I WOULD like, for the next few paragraphs, to talk about myself. I know what you're thinking: how can a Hollywood actor, who must be continually preoccupied with caring for others, take time out to talk about himself? Because in doing so perhaps I can explain why, after decades of never discussing or showing my art collection, I have decided to exhibit it now, and in Las Vegas.

Being a celebrity can cause an accidental cheapening of the things one holds dear. A slip of the tongue in an interview and it's easy for me to feel I've sold out some private part of my life in exchange for publicity. I kept silent about my art collection in an effort to keep something personal for myself. My collection was for me, friends and other interested people. I didn't want these works to be perceived as vehicles for publicity, or to be treated as commercial objects used to promote an "image." I wanted the time and privacy to be dumb about art, to be sentimental, to be moved by it, to misunderstand it, to love it, without putting a public face on my thoughts.

I have collected art for more than 30 years. Recently, it occurred to me it was time to exhibit these few pictures. I can only guess why. Perhaps my protectiveness about art has been replaced by a privacy of another kind and I've found something more important to jealously guard. Perhaps age has allowed me to see things in a simpler way. Maybe I've just relaxed.

I would like to tell you that I'm showing these pictures because I feel a need to share them with the public, that I can no longer hoard them away, that I can't continue for one more second to keep all their radiance to myself. I wish I could say that _ wouldn't I be swell? But I will tell you the real reason I have agreed to show these pictures in Las Vegas: it sounds like fun.

I am fortunate that such an avaricious hobby can offer such sublimity. During the course of my art-collecting life, I have bought crassly and I have bought nobly. I have mused about art and art collecting endlessly. I have overthought, under- thought, acted both rashly and judiciously. I've blown it, goofed up, sold off and traded. Within seconds, I've grown to dislike a painting I had struggled months to acquire. I have stared dumbly at pictures for thousands of man-hours; I have been humbled in the face of pure genius.

Some paintings I own have grown on me and continue to give off their magic even after years of living with them. This interaction with art has seriously altered my life. After all my gallery visits, catalog thumbing, auction activity and clumsy negotiation, this selfish little pursuit has given me two disproportionate gifts. One is proximity to and communication with a beautiful object. The other is friends. Smart, funny, serious and open-minded friends.

Some people seem to be born with taste. Oscar Wilde. Noël Coward. Such individuals seem to have a natal instinct for objects, art, words and, dare I say, fabrics. The singer Andy Williams has it, minus the fabrics part. One day in the 60's, with no background in art appreciation, Andy was driving down the street in Chicago and peripherally saw a painting in a gallery window. He drove a few blocks, turned around and went into the gallery and made some inquiries. Never having heard of the artist, Andy bought the painting. It turned out to be a splendid example of the most desirable type of painting by Hans Hofmann, the Abstract Expressionist painter and teacher.

But what about folks like me: born in Waco, Tex., raised in Orange County, Calif., never exposed to anything artistic -- except comedy -- before my 18th birthday? You may be able to slot your own story into the previous sentence. I'm not sure I ever acquired taste, but what I have acquired is a feeling for art. This feeling is not absolute; it is relative. It came to me not as a blast of intuition but through the viewing of hundreds of paintings, and sorting them into a vague and fluid hierarchy.

Cy Twombly is a brilliant artist whose career began in the 1950's. His work, for the beginning art lover, can be extremely bewildering. Squiggles and numbers are spread across white or gray canvases, giving the effect of a child's destruction of a piece of drawing paper. After I saw a dozen Twomblys, several emerged as best, several fell into the middle and a few I didn't know what to do with.

THEN, slowly, the poetry of his work began to show itself. Then the violence. There was sometimes movement in the composition, sometimes a flat stillness. The penciled numbers on the canvases took on the glow of a crazy mental doodle that seemed to represent the endless background noise of the mind. The structure of the paintings and drawings revealed something monumental, without there being one monumental thing in them. I began to appreciate how different Twombly's work was from anyone else's. How he dared to take nothing and turn it into something, how he spoke with no one's voice but his own.

But none of these qualities makes a great artist; what makes Twombly great is that he mysteriously, inexplicably, made art that museums, scholars and collectors generally recognize as profound, and yet, though his work generates thousands of essay and book pages, no one is really able to say exactly why. Such experiences have confirmed my belief that one's most deeply entrenched taste is the acquired taste, whether it's for art, avocados or comedians.

In college, I had a friend named Phil Carey who was an artist and introduced me to the artist's way of thinking, and the magic names that I would someday be collecting. The art world had recently been set on end by Warhol and Lichtenstein. The Color Field painters, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, still had notoriety. Jasper Johns's intelligent pictures appealed to the brain as well as the eye. Pollock and de Kooning were giants, and Rothko stirred the somber and melancholy soul.

These names had cachet and power. (I believe the reason I never merchandised my image when I became a popular stand- up comedian was a dim memory from these idealistic college days; these artists wouldn't have done it, and it just wasn't going to be part of my career. Of course, now I would look back with weird pride at a Steve Martin lunch box, especially after I found out that the Beatles had done it.)

In 1970, though I had dabbled in antique- store paintings, I officially became a collector when I purchased an Ed Ruscha print of the famous Hollywood sign. It had a certain irony that I liked, and Ed was close with, and had collaborated with, Mason Williams, who was the head writer of the Smothers Brothers comedy hour on which I was a beginning writer. I bought books on all kinds of art and browsed the antique stores along La Cienega Boulevard.

As I blundered my way around the art world, I came in contact with a dealer named Terry Delapp, who introduced me to 19th-century American painting, and I immediately fell in love with it. Easily graspable, the landscapes and genre paintings of the period were quite collectable, and I enjoyed the negotiating as much as the pictures themselves. Terry and I bought and traded through slightly sloshed eyeballs as we stayed up late and mooed over the glory of the paintings while slipping oysters Rockefeller down our throats. We amused ourselves by imagining the world's worst painting collection. Our lone entry was a picture we spotted in a local auction catalog: "Queen Victoria Viewing the Seals," and it was a painting of just that.

During the next five years, I picked up information from Terry that has served me my entire collecting life. I watched as pictures were bought and sold, as deals were made, as paintings were examined and researched. I learned how to key out (tighten) sagging canvases, and I watched as dingy yellowed skies became eggshell blue as they were cleaned. I saw how an ultraviolet light, when waved over pictures like a magic wand, would reveal previously invisible overpaint, restoration, added signatures (curiously, the fake signature would appear to float over the canvas) and other ills that had befallen them through the years. Later, a varnish was invented that was opaque to ultraviolet light, making it less effective, teaching me that crime was in a technological war with crime prevention. But the good guys were at work, too: I was able to purchase through a classified ad in the back of an art magazine a homemade sample card of the many new varnishes, with a description of how they fluoresced under ultraviolet.

At 24, after my stint writing for network television was over, and with my collecting instinct firmly in place, I traveled the United States performing my comedy act at nightclubs, colleges and folk clubs. The comedy boom had yet to happen and there were no comedy clubs to play. I worked at night, but during the day I haunted museums and college libraries. I learned from Terry the value of having one's own art library; in addition to its store of knowledge about art and artists, the use of the attributions and illustrations found in art books is one of the surest ways to separate the fake paintings from the real ones.

I remember spotting a rare and valuable book in a Midwestern college _ it was Mable Dodge Luhan's early volume on Southwestern painting, "Taos and Its Artists" _ and wondering if I could smuggle it past the low-tech librarian. But my better judgment prevailed and I left it in place. This daytime study, along with my constant phone chats with Terry and Victoria Dailey, another art dealer and valuable friend, made me a walking catalog of 19th-century American painting, right down to the artists' birth and death dates. Atlanta, Spokane, Madison, Little Rock, Tallahassee, you name it, I was there. And I did quick visual checks in the local antique stores, hoping to find a stray Winslow Homer that somehow had lost its way.

When I studied the history of philosophy in college, I was continually pulled forward by the next philosophical movement. After Descartes, it seemed that Hume had all the answers, then Kant, then Wittgenstein. I kept looking ahead to and being swept up by my next investigation in philosophy. This seduction happened in my art collecting, too. After the Luminists and the Hudson River school, I was looking at the American Impressionists, then the modernists, and then, helped along by the Paris-New York show at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1977, the Abstract Expressionists and further, until I came to the bewildering end and started to look backward in time, and across the Atlantic toward Europe.

MY collecting has been guided by various philosophies, too. One was to collect by image: a Luminist picture was a Luminist picture whether it was by Kensett (a master) or Fortunato Arriola (an unknown but fine artist who, incidentally, died young, drowned at sea during a ship fire). Another was by name value: the big artists only, the ones who cut through to the history books and were the recipients of voluminous ink. Yet another was by movement: if you had a Pollock and a de Kooning, didn't you need the other Abstract Expressionists, even though you might not like all of them?

Then, I came upon a remarkable philosophy: I would only buy paintings that dealers would die for. I had come to realize that the odd little picture that you dearly love but no one else does was essentially unsellable when and if the time came (Terry called them "cellar dwellers"). I have heard pictures disparaged too many times for the strangest reasons, "not enough teepees" being among my favorites. In other words, if you're buying a Salvador Dali it had better be surreal and not be his one straightforward portraits of a 1938 Dodge.

This philosophy of collecting sounds crass, but it isn't. There exists a remarkable consensus among dealers and the art world in general about which paintings are desirable. There is just no argument about a painting that falls short (especially if you're selling), and there is no argument about a painting that is unequivocally first rate. Quality seems to be simply "known," though practically impossible _ and unnecessary _ to quantify. I found that dealers, whose living depends on their ability to evaluate works of art, often display an uncanny perception for pictures, and I tried to see pictures from their particular angle.

I used this approach to collecting for some time, and it worked well. I ended up with a tightly hewn and strict collection of some pretty decent pictures, but eventually I tired. I realized that adherence to a particular methodology of collecting was not really what I was interested in or could afford. What I finally said to myself was this: I would like some nice paintings to hang on my walls, and I proceeded accordingly. It is curious to realize that it took a lifetime of collecting to reach such a simple conclusion.

So this is what I have, an extremely personal group of pictures. And less than a reflection of one consistent vision or philosophy, this collection is, frankly, a history of what was affordable and available at the time. There are great pictures mixed in with good pictures, mixed in with oddballs, but I endorse and have found something worthwhile in every one of them. The collector and actor Vincent Price once told me a story about his wife Coral Brown. They were giving an art tour in their home, when, with a particular frown, a woman looked at a Diebenkorn they owned and snarled: "You have so many beautiful things. Why would you own that? What is that called?" And Coral Brown replied, "It's called `We Like It.' Now get out."


[Endnote from the Times editor:]

Steve Martin, the comedian and writer, is exhibiting works from his art collection for the first time, at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, starting on Saturday. The 28 pictures, representing most of his holdings, range from Georges Seurat to David Hockney to Robert Crumb. This article is adapted from Mr. Martin's catalog for the exhibition.


* From The New York Times, April 1, 2001.