Art and History

I am an art dealer. I used to be a rich General Contractor/Real Estate Developer/Art Collector until a Los Angeles Billionaire seduced my father into selling him an apartment project we built and never paid us the twelve million he owed us. The deal was literally written on the back of a cocktail napkin. I went from the high life to the alms bowl in one dramatic swoop. Maybe the last chapter hasn't been written in the saga but that will be a tale for another day.

Anyway like many of us, there came a point in my life where I had to reinvent myself and I became an art dealer. A pretty good one, I might humbly submit. I primarily sell art created from 1890 to 1940, although there are occasional exceptions. I covet the great regionalists, Benton and Grant Wood, printmakers like Spruance, Martin Lewis and Kloss. Love the great Taos, California and Pennsylvania artists, as well. Garber, Kleitsch, Redmond, Redfield, Ufer. Rich for me would be rich enough to buy my own Edward Hopper, one of my absolute top favorites.

I really love great illustration. N.C. Wyeth is another one of the titans of painting. Pyle, Leyendecker, Cornwell, Rockwell, these guys had more talent in one finger than your Rothko or Stella could summon up in a lifetime. Give me a person who works every day for decades mastering a medium over a schmuck like Warhol or Haring or Leichtenstein who keep regurgitating some trite cartoon like idea again and again.

I love some of the great illustrators today that seem to have been forgotten or not given credit for their artistic chops. Matt Mahurin, Marshall Arisman, Robert Giusti, Brad Holland. Tremendous and brilliant, all.

I personally don't collect any more except for the work of my old friend and mentor Rick Griffin. A brilliant, revolutionary artist who purloined from the best of the illustrators and had absolute integrity and consistency in every brushstroke. I watched and worked along side Rick on many projects and he would give every job, no matter how small, the attention that Michelangelo might have bestowed on the Sistine Chapel. Frustrating at times, but utterly beguiling, he feared nothing and treaded where no man has ever dared to tread.


Modern Art is a scam. Rich sheep licking each other's arses. Damien Hirst is the current fraud of the month. Maybe god's way of extricating extra cash from fat bastard's wallets. Jeff Koons, Scharf, Pollock, the list stretches back a mile. I think Basquiat had real talent. I really like Serra. Lucien Freud. Richter. Thiebaud is a freaking god. But most of these guys are carney hucksters. In my opinion. When I was painting in college, we talked about getting anointed by the gay art mafia. Maybe that's not fair, it just always seemed that that was how the game was rigged. The stuff just seemed so snide and cynical and devoid of lasting beauty. And there are real guys out there who will unfortunately never crack the pink ceiling and never find an audience until they are long in the grave.

One day my brother and I stood in front of a broom that a janitor had mistakenly left against a wall at the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla and I did a twenty minute riff on the piece's artistic sensibilities. The nearby docent was none too pleased.

My friend Denis, who is a collector from Oakland, has asked me to write more about art. I plan to start doing posts on current artists that I like. I have never used this website to promote my business and will not start now. But I would like to introduce some artists to you whose work I think is relevant.