COMMENTARY : A Three-Gallery Tribute to Nicholas Wilder : Art: The Stuart Regen, Asher-Faure and Gemini G.E.L. galleries are mounting shows; Sunday dinner will honor the late gallery owner.

When the late Nicholas Wilder left Los Angeles for New York in early 1980, the decision to move seemed utterly perverse.

Here was an art dealer who, since 1965, had operated one of the most widely respected galleries anywhere; who had weathered, better than most, the dizzying rise and precipitous fall of the city’s art life, and who was well aware of the prognostications of revival being made for the scene--claims coming in the wake of news of a planned Museum of Contemporary Art, an expanded County Museum of Art, an impossibly wealthy J. Paul Getty Trust, a mushrooming number of galleries and all the rest. Why leave now?

Wilder offered lots of practical and no doubt genuine reasons at the time. In some small way, however, I’m convinced one factor in that surprise decision was precisely that it was perverse. Given Wilder’s rapt and remarkably perceptive engagement with the anarchistic nature of aesthetic experience, a dose of contrariness carried irresistible panache.

Wilder, who tragically succumbed last year to complications arising from AIDS, is now the subject of a three-gallery celebration and a benefit dinner, the latter to be held Sunday evening at the West Hollywood restaurant Trumps. Proceeds from both will go towards construction of the Nicholas Wilder Center at AIDS Project Los Angeles.

The center, designed by architect Brian Murphy, will be a facility to house the organization’s volunteer resources office. The choice is fitting. Wilder was appalled that private monies had to be raised for basic scientific research in the face of a critical pandemic, believing that duty to be the moral responsibility of government.

Last week, the Stuart Regen Gallery opened its portion of “A Tribute to Nicholas Wilder,” while the Asher-Faure Gallery and Gemini G.E.L. will complete the trio with shows that open Saturday. The three exhibitions feature drawings, paintings, sculptures and prints by artists who showed with Wilder’s gallery. Some works have been borrowed from local collections, some from the dealer’s estate; others are for sale.

The galleries participating in the tribute claim varying relationships to the dealer’s legacy. Asher-Faure’s Patricia Faure was director of the Wilder Gallery from 1973-78 before opening her own space with partner Betty Asher. Gemini G.E.L., the venerable print workshop on Melrose Avenue, collaborated with numerous painters and sculptors who showed with Wilder, including Dan Flavin, Sam Francis, Bruce Nauman, Joe Goode, David Hockney and many others. And Stuart Regen, a young art dealer who opened his gallery just four months ago, clearly seems to have set the Wilder Gallery as a benchmark for his own aspirations. On the entrance wall to his show he’s hung the original sign from Wilder’s first space (a sign reportedly painted 25 years ago by the artist Edward Ruscha).

Wilder’s taste was certainly catholic, as might be expected of a dealer whose gallery spanned the era of Pop, Minimalism, Color-field painting, Conceptual art, post-Minimalism and numerous other adjectivally diverse brands of art. He showed artists whose work was claimed for all those movements, as well as artists whose work stood outside any of them.

The stained and sprayed Color-field paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski occupied an especially large part of the schedule in the earlier years. If the work has faded considerably from prominence since then, its commitment to languorous sensuality is revealing. Color-field was the lighter, dreamier side of a darker, more dangerous eroticism, encountered in an artist such as John Altoon. (A particularly vulgar pen-and-wash drawing by Altoon, on the all-American subject of the farmer’s daughter, is included at Asher-Faure.) And both were light years from the disconcerting, conceptual gymnastics of Walter De Maria, whose blunt chrome wedge, with the word bouquet engraved at the top, is at Stuart Regen.

Still, aside from his prominent role in establishing Los Angeles as a significant artistic center, Wilder is likely to be most enduringly remembered for his enthusiastic support of two artists who emerged in California: John McLaughlin, the self-taught painter whose spare, sophisticated abstractions are among the great paintings of the postwar era (two canvases are in the tribute), and Bruce Nauman, the wildly gifted maker of all manner of eccentric sculptural objects and environments (a drawing for an installation and a neon anagram of Wilder’s name, “Lewdir,” are on view).

Wilder showed McLaughlin’s paintings only twice--in 1972 and, three years after the artist’s death, in 1979--but his commitment to the maverick painter was well-known. McLaughlin was not a “discovery” for the world of art. During the 20 years that followed his 1946 move from Massachusetts to the sleepy seaside village of Dana Point, he had shown with the Felix Landau Gallery on four occasions. But he was staunchly independent as a painter, a man who didn’t find his real passion until he was nearly 50 and who was happy to follow his head and heart while painting quietly in his garage.

By contrast, Wilder was indeed the first to show the idiosyncratic and highly personal work of Nauman, who was just 25 and recently out of school in 1966 when he had the first of five exhibitions at the gallery. Today, Nauman is regarded internationally as among the finest artists of his generation.

Idiosyncratic, highly personal, independent--the adjectives that describe these artists’ work are appropriate to a remembrance of the dealer too. His undeniably notable role in the discovery or promotion of important artists is not what finally set Wilder apart. (“When you really look back,” he told this interviewer in 1980, “there’s no question in my mind that Bruce Nauman would be right where he is today without me.”) Instead, a passionate core of independence in Wilder instinctively allowed for a kinship with artists such as McLaughlin and Nauman.

Perverse isn’t exactly the right word to describe Wilder’s decision to leave Los Angeles for New York, where he was soon to surprise everyone by embarking on a career as a painter himself. Passionate and independent are.

“Nicholas Wilder: A Tribute” remains through April 14 at Asher-Faure Gallery, 612 N. Almont Drive; Stuart Regen Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive , and Gemini G.E.L., 8365 Melrose Ave. For information on the benefit dinner, call AIDS Project Los Angeles, (213) 962-1600, Ext. 279.