OF LUNCHES, TRENDS AND PARTIES --OR HOW TO COLLECT MODERN ART

Maurice Tuchman ordered a drink at the circular bar at Le Dome and related the morning’s extraordinary event: One of Los Angeles’ most important art collectors had pledged a donation of three 20th-Century masterpieces to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “And that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Tuchman said excitedly. A bequest of the entire collection was highly possible.

The donor’s name was still hush-hush, but Tuchman made no secret of the fact that this was the kind of bonanza he had devoted his career to obtaining. He had been cultivating the collector practically since 1965, when he founded LACMA’s 20th-Century department.

The 48-year-old curator sipped a circumspect Virgin Mary before lunch. As usual, he was dapperly dressed in an Italian sports coat and slacks, his hair finely tapered in layers, his metal-rimmed glasses, which lengthen his myopic vision, fashionably tinted.

He had reserved a quiet back-room table where he could be interviewed. Normally, he sits in the middle room behind the bar, “a good place to people-watch,” he said, pointing out his preferred vantage point.

A habitue of Los Angeles’ trendy restaurant scene, Tuchman has spent two decades hobnobbing over meals with collectors, donors, artists and dealers--advising, charming, coaxing to get acquisitions. He has built the museum’s 20th-Century holdings from a straggling assemblage of non-illustrious works into a respected collection with enviable high points and a potential to become a major national force in art.

In April, LACMA will celebrate its 20th anniversary. Tuchman is already feting a period of renewed activity.

In October, 1986, the museum’s new contemporary art wing, the Anderson Gallery, will open, providing 14,500 square feet for 20th-Century works, almost triple the current capacity and roughly the size of the Whitney Museum in New York.

A veteran of blockbuster exhibitions of the ‘60s, Tuchman is again at work on a big-budget show, which will open the four-story facility.

As a leading local arbiter of what contemporary works enter a museum--and thus the threshold of history--Tuchman has long been kicking up controversy over his modus operandi. His colorful style has also made him a highly visible personality.

In a series of meetings, he revealed himself as a passionate art historian, a realistic business dealer, a sensitive aesthete and a person who gets a kick out of keeping on the cutting edge of just about everything.

With the panache of a man who loves nothing so much as the role of a gracious host, he presented the world of galleries, museums and a curator’s life as prettily as caviar sparkling on ice.

At Le Dome, he welcomed his luncheon companion with a social kiss and a warm hand clasp. He tossed a friendly greeting to the owner and waved in passing to a movie producer.

It was his busy time for donations, what with year-end tax breaks, he explained over lunch. His department, he said, has meager funds for acquiring art. “It’s catch as catch can,” he said, and one of the principal ways of catching is the collector-donor phenomenon.

“There’s a way of encouraging a collector to buy something and getting him something at a good time at a good price with the expectation that because the museum is involved it will come to the museum,” he said.

For that reason, Tuchman’s date book was peppered with luncheon appointments.

Other activities were noted in his small, precise script. There had been the opening of LACMA’s “Max Beckmann Retrospective.” Artforum magazine had run an article asking why the exhibition had not opened in New York. Tuchman was immensely pleased by this. “Los Angeles,” he asserted, “is the only city to jostle New York.”

He had attended a meeting of the executive board of the Modern and Contemporary Art Council, which had included discussions of a lecture series to educate new members, a fund-raising project of selling scarves and evaluation of a New York art junket by members. The council, with 151 member couples annually contributing $500 each, is Tuchman’s single source of regular money for acquisitions; it is also a breeding ground for potential board of trustees members.

For the upcoming week, Tuchman was to be a guest of actor Steve Martin, the board’s newest member, who was throwing a little get-together for some of his favorite friends in the art world, and David Hockney was lecturing on the Wolper Picassos for members of the Entertainment Alliance, an exclusive Hollywood collectors’ club newly formed by Tuchman.

There were also the usual staff meetings and paper work. A modest exhibition, Tuchman said, requires a hundred memos and up to four months’ work; in the last two years, he has mounted five small-scale shows.

But the bulk of his interest has been claimed by the blockbuster for the Anderson Gallery opening, which purports to trace the origins of abstract art to a belief in mysticism. Major fountainheads of contemporary art--Mondrian, Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp--believed in the occult, and Tuchman plans to demonstrate that it inspired their work.

Finishing an “Olympic Salad” at Le Dome, the curator offered a visit to the work place where Tuchman the scholar holes up.

In his office on the third floor of the Hammer Wing, Tuchman’s big oval desk was bunkered with books on occultism, alchemy and mystic symbols. A wallboard was pegged with photocopies of paintings depicting psychic images, signs and cosmic forces. Tuchman has been working on the show since 1981. “It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done,” he says.

Tuchman is an old hand at blockbuster shows. In the ‘60s and early ‘70s, he organized the first group exhibition of Abstract Expressionists, “The New York School”; presented an elucidative retrospective of ‘60s Minimalist sculpture, and, in “Art and Technology,” challenged artists to explore high tech horizons.

“He evolved as one of the most interesting curators in the country,” observes Henry Hopkins, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

But, as the ‘70s advanced, interest in contemporary art, high in the ‘60s, diminished among the museum’s trustees. A tight economy and Proposition 13 all but obliterated funds, while Conceptual Art, which dominated the era, elicited little enthusiasm or money in the board room.

“If you didn’t have a steamroller in there, you were in trouble,” notes a close observer, “and Maurice isn’t a steamroller.”

The ‘80s, however, have brought a return to more accessible figurative painting. Says Tuchman: “Everyone knows that art is back, and everyone is relieved. People are giving more money. They want to show more, and they have become a constituency that is desirous again.”

In 1980, Tuchman and curator Stephanie Barron mounted the extensive retrospective “The Russian Avant-Garde: 1910-1930,” the first big show in nearly a decade. And LACMA responded to the Museum of Contemporary Art challenge of the plans for the Anderson Gallery.

Says Hopkins: “The big question in everybody’s mind is: Will Maurice now really fulfill the promise that people have been waiting for until the museum had enough space to really do something?” Tuchman’s hopes are high. “In a generation, we should be ahead of MOMA (the Museum of Modern Art in New York) in terms of the quality of developing contemporary collections,” he says.

“All of us would like to think a museum can play a role in our town the way the Whitney or the Modern do in New York, which is to say a museum people go to without planning ahead. I don’t know of anything that I want more than for that phenomenon to take place.”

The involvement of local artists in the Anderson Gallery is a more sensitive issue. “They’ll be treated as more equal among the equals,” Tuchman promises, though he adds, “I think ultimately the best thing we do is not whether we show local art or not; it’s to achieve credibility in the arena of contemporary art.”

Tuchman’s relation to the local artists’ community has long been a subject of controversy.

“He’s really up the creek as far as the local art population is concerned,” says Joyce Trieman, who has had one-person shows at the Whitney Museum and the Chicago Institute of Art and has one work in LACMA’s collection. “He should get off his butt and go out and see what’s going on.” Trieman characterizes the museum’s local interests as “a constant repetition of artists who have made their mark in New York.”

But, says San Diego resident Allan Kaprow, the noted father of ‘60s Happenings: “Every city complains that its curators don’t pay enough attention to local artists. It happens in Berlin and Milan and Paris. If you want to be a (museum) director or a curator, you want to create the impression in the eyes of the world that you have a bigger vision than your local parochial one.”

“It’s easier for most of us to be seen in Chicago and New York, Milan and Duesseldorf, you name it. Regularly we go to those places, but hardly ever do we get even an invitation of the common kind around the house. It’s like Jesus said, ‘A prophet not in thy own home.’ ”

Nevertheless, says Richard Diebenkorn, internationally known and recognized in LACMA exhibits: “I’d be distressed to see the museum become a little showplace for local talent.”

Tuchman defends his record by pointing principally to shows for winners of the museum’s annual Young Talent Award, given to Los Angeles area artists.

“You have a constituency of, say, 10,000 living artists, and you can be assured that a tiny, tiny minority of those are going to appreciate the way you assess the contemporary scene,” he says. “Everyone’s got their 15 minutes of fame, as Andy Warhol said, or their four years of reasonable success with the ruling taste makers.

“It’s important to be compassionate and passionately involved with contemporary art, but I think it’s also important to have a distance. If I’ve kept from being cynical and burned out, the reason is because I’m an art historian.”

Tuchman’s personal pantheon of artists reveals a penchant for an intellectual quotient and a passion for early contemporary art. Most lauded are Velasquez, Cezanne and Matisse. “There is something about the measure and reserve in their work, as opposed to equally great contemporaries, that I find more enriching and more deeply affecting,” he says.

Tuchman is also an expert on the Expressionist painter Chaim Soutine who, he says “has one of the most painterly brush strokes of the 20th Century.” Next fall he will publish a catalogue raisonnee , a definitive work, on the artist, completing his doctorate degree and becoming one of a few curators of contemporary art to hold a Ph.D.

Such an accomplishment represents a quantum leap from Tuchman’s childhood.

The son of Polish Jewish immigrants, Tuchman was brought up with an older sister on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, then a middle-class Jewish neighborhood, where, Tuchman says, “we were in by the skin of our teeth.” His father, whom he describes as a scholarly but formally uneducated man, worked in a matzo bakery and the family lived in a two-room apartment.

With a talent for caricature, Tuchman was determined to become a comic-strip artist. “I saw that as my passport out. I knew that if I could just hang in there long enough, life would become for me as it was depicted in the comics with Rex Morgan and Superman, where people lived in penthouses and you really enjoyed Manhattan.”

Tuchman entered tuition-free City University, then City College of New York, only to realize that he lacked the talent to become a great cartoonist.

One day, he came across a reproduction of the famous Irish illuminated manuscripts, the “Book of Kells.” “I could feel myself break into a sweat when I realized that this was what art history was about--that something could be so rich that people could spend their whole lives trying to figure it out.”

After graduating in art history, Tuchman entered the graduate program at Columbia University, where he did a stint as a Fulbright schlar in Berlin and studied under the distinguished historian Meyer Schapiro.

“The first lesson,” Tuchman recalls, “was that when you look at a painting you have to bite into it with your eyes.

“But academe didn’t have any style. I was looking for color, vivacity, briskness and all the salutary effects money can bring to people.” He found this mix at the Guggenheim Museum, where he worked for two years as a young research fellow. “I remember feeling that this was the vortex point, where academe meets business, where money meets art, where everything hooks up at Grand Central Station.”

From the Guggenheim, he moved in 1964 to LACMA, and at age 27 became the museum’s first senior curator of modern art.

Other than his functions as administrator and scholar, Tuchman keeps an eye on the current art scene. Comments San Francisco’s Hopkins: “His is not an eye that recognizes new art, but I’d say it’s an eye that’s very fast on the uptake in terms of what’s going on.”

Tuchman’s principal oracles of the au courant are art dealers. He receives catalogues from major world galleries, and every third Saturday or so, he does the West Hollywood gallery scene.

On a particular Saturday, Tuchman began his rounds at a Robert Longo show at the Larry Gagosian Gallery. Tuchman wants to buy a Longo, along with the other hot New York Neo-Expressionists.

He studied a five-part cruciform work. The asking price was $55,000; Tuchman said he could get it for $35,000.

Around the corner at Asher/Faure, Tuchman joined Jeffrey Deitch, a New York-based corporate art adviser who keeps up with street talk. Deitch is one of Tuchman’s hottest tipsters; Tuchman also has tipsters in London, Paris and Cologne.

Deitch called the Asher/Faure show “funky regional art” and said he’d seen the painter’s works at an East Village gallery. Tuchman said the graffiti-inspired art of the new lower East Side scene was “trashy stuff,” but Deitch persuaded him to take a look on his next visit. Normally, Tuchman’s beat is SoHo, Madison Avenue and 57th Street.

Across from Asher/Faure, at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Brice Marden had an opening, fresh from the Pace Gallery in New York. Marden shuffled in with a bottle-blond woman friend. “So what d’you think, it’s dreck?” he said.

“Oh, wow, this is really great!” Tuchman rejoined, regarding the cool, Minimalist work.

There was one local artist in the crowd. “There’s a resistance to non-L.A. artists. It’s an old-fashioned, hidebound tradition,” Tuchman said.

He shook the artist’s hand. “Hey, I like your boots,” he said, moving on.

Tuchman left the gallery scene, driving his 1963 white Mercedes-Benz, its license plate coded “LACMA.” It was the last year that Mercedeses were entirely hand-tooled, he said, as he headed for the Hollywood Hills, where he lives with Sari Shapiro, his wife of two years. He met Shapiro, a 28-year-old casting director, at a Thanksgiving dinner “for single strays in Hollywood,” he said, and fell for her because “she’s straight as an arrow.”

In the ‘60s, Tuchman was married for six years to a soap opera starlet, Blossom Plumb, and acquired a reputation as a colorful man-about-the-city. “When the fashion was to wear beads and leave three shirt-buttons open, he’d leave five open,” comments a longtime acquaintance.

Tuchman attributes opinions of him as flamboyant to people who “think curators are supposed to be venerable and semi-crippled.” Nevertheless, he says, “I think I’m subdued now.”

He attributes his soberer self largely to his marriage to Shapiro, the peacock-bright ties she gives him notwithstanding. When she walked in the house with a bag of groceries, he called to her, “Hi, sweetie! Hi ya, honey!” A slim, sporty woman with a tumble of dark voluptuous hair, Shapiro wore fitted jeans, cowgirl boots and a wide leather belt that Tuchman had brought back from a chic Paris boutique.

The couple prepared a platter of white wine, Brie and imported monk’s ale and sat hand-in-hand on the couch.

Outside of art, Tuchman names his home life as his most passionate hobby. His house, a modest version of a California dream habitat, dominates the Pacific and the city. The glass-enclosed living room sports a pair of Mies van der Rohe chairs and a Le Corbusier chaise longue. On a desk, a brass letter opener is placed perpendicular to a Tiffany pen, which is set parallel to a show catalogue. “I get great annoyance out of things that aren’t right,” Tuchman says.

Both Shapiro and Tuchman keep barbells at the foot of their bed, and Tuchman takes Nautilus classes every other day. He compares working out to looking at great paintings, both of which “make you have to be more alive yourself.”

There is a small collection of art: a painting given to Tuchman by Jim Dine; some works by his friend, English artist R. B. Kitaj, and a couple of sculptures by Robert Graham, with whom he has a close association. But he doesn’t collect art, he says. “The curatorial urge to collect is different from the private urge. You’re buying to make a certain view of history.

“A real turn-on if I had the money, would be to build a vision of history over 10 to 20 years. That’s a hope.”

But it’s the social aspect of a curator’s job that spills most conspicuously into his private life. Tuchman’s Sunday afternoon parties around the pool are lively events in the arts society.

“A great party,” he says, revealing his formula, “is older people who may be amused to see who’s cooking at 20, and younger people on the way up who may be happy to come to a curator’s home and meet a collector or an executive in a big company. I really get off on that sort of thing.

He has thrown a party for Robert Rauschenberg, he says, and adds, “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy are regulars at my house.”

But if Tuchman describes himself as “jovial and gregarious,” he also admits: “I trained myself to be that way, because I think it’s the right way to be. It wasn’t natural when I was 18 or 20.”

The squirrels that hang out chez Tuchman need no prepping in sociability. A big bushy-tailed gray begged vociferously on the sun deck until Tuchman offered him a cocktail nibble. He snatched it, his teeth nipping Tuchman’s finger, then dashed off to a nearby pine tree. “He’s a real John Wayne character,” said Tuchman. “A rough, tough squirrel. He’s my favorite.” Henry Hopkins, director of San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art:

‘The big question in everybody’s mind is: Will Maurice now really fulfill the promise that people have been waiting for until the (L.A. County) museum had enough space to really do something?’

Maurice Tuchman:

‘When you look at a painting you have to bite into it with your eyes. But academe didn’t have any style. I was looking for color, vivacity, briskness and all the salutary effects money can bring to people.’