The Norton Foundation Funds Adventurous Art...

As a self-described member of the nouveaux riches, Peter Norton says that he and his wife, Eileen, are “climbing a learning curve” to find out how well-to-do people conduct their affairs. By conventional standards the couple haven’t learned much.

Money isn’t the problem. The Nortons became multimillionaires a few years ago when Peter, a computer guru, propelled a $30,000 investment in software packages and books into a spectacularly successful business. Last year, he sold his company, Peter Norton Computing Inc., and he hopes never to be gainfully employed again.

That should allow the Nortons to join the idle rich, but they don’t quite fit. “We’re just instinctively unconventional,” he says, without the slightest tinge of regret.

The couple and their two young children live in a gracious two-story Monterey Colonial Revival house overlooking Santa Monica Canyon, but they persist in stocking their home with an ever-changing array of esoteric contemporary artworks that only the cognoscenti love. They perform their civic duty by supporting mainstream cultural organizations, but they prefer funding art projects that Peter says are “too weird” or “too despised” for conventional institutions to touch.

The Nortons recently made a move that lends a conventional appearance to their offbeat philanthropy, however. They have opened a proper office to oversee their professional, personal and philanthropic activities and to administer a $100-million investment portfolio that funds family and charitable trusts. “Before, we were doing this like ordinary middle-class jerks--out of our bedroom,” the 48-year-old philanthropist says, surveying his new digs.

The Norton Family Office is at 225 Arizona Ave. in Santa Monica, on the second floor of a four-story building designed by Johannes Van Tilburg & Partners and inspired by the turn-of-the-century Viennese Werkstatte style. A series of invitational openings is planned this week to publicize plans for giving about $1.5 million annually in support of cultural and humanitarian projects.

The office, which houses and operates the Norton Family Foundation free of charge, will give a public face to a grant-giving organization that was established two years ago. When fully funded, the foundation’s endowment will spin off at least $1 million a year for grants, adjusted for inflation in perpetuity, Norton says. Augmented by the family’s annual giving, that should provide a balance of about $1.5 million a year for the arts and humanitarian projects.

“That’s small potatoes by standards of American wealth, but it takes some running,” Norton says.

Anne Etheridge, formerly a fund-raiser for public television station KCET and a development director for the California State University system, is administrative director of the Norton Family Office and executive director and secretary-treasurer of the foundation board.

Charged with “doing good work in our name,” she reviews grant proposals, provides information on funding policies and serves as a consultant, Norton says.

Despite such businesslike trappings, the foundation is not modeled “after the big guys,” he says. “If you can only give 1% or .1% of what the Rockefellers do, people are glad to get the money, but it does little good. We wanted to make a difference.”

Norton also wanted to avoid “the dullness” and “the ponderousness” of “belt and suspenders” boards that govern most foundations. There is no lengthy review process for grant proposals, no waiting for board meetings at the Norton foundation. “You can die before you get an answer” under such weighty systems, he says. “We respond to grants in 72 hours, sometimes overnight.”

Staying nimble and flexible allows the foundation to help “the wretched of the Earth,” he says, and to respond to “young, amateurishly run” organizations, occasionally performing rescue missions. For example, the foundation paid for lights at the Los Angeles Photography Center when the center ran out of money just before the scheduled opening of an exhibition.

“When people call and ask for application forms, I tell them to take a crayon and scribble the request on a piece of paper and send it in. If it takes more than 10 minutes in person or half an hour on paper to make your pitch, you are wasting your time,” he says.

Works that deal with political, racial and sexual issues are frequent objects of Norton philanthropy. In celebration of the 1990 AIDS Awareness Day, for example, the Nortons commissioned artist Daniel Martinez’s “Obscene Is,” an edition of plastic boxes of colored condoms. The transparent boxes are printed with such slogans as “We will not tolerate forced morality.”

A press release describes the Norton Family Foundation as “a spontaneous and exploratory organization, dedicated to searching out the new and innovative in a variety of fields, with a particular focus on the visual arts.” But not all the foundation’s support goes to eyebrow-raising projects.

What Norton calls “the oddball stuff” composes one of four categories funded. Under two other categories, KCRW public radio station gets major support from the foundation, as do such mainstream cultural institutions as the Music Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The fourth category provides $50,000 grants to curators to buy contemporary artworks. In 1989, the inaugural year of the program, grants went to Mary Jane Jacobs, who was chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Paul Schimmel, who was at the Newport Harbor Art Museum but subsequently succeeded Jacobs at MOCA. The 1990 curators grants were awarded to Ann Goldstein at MOCA, Robert Storr at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Kathy Halbreich, then curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and now director of the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis. This year’s recipients are Trevor Fairbrother at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Madeleine Grynsztejn at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla.

The foundation also funds related projects, such as a recent symposium for adventurous curators, chaired by Hugh Davies, director of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art.

The Nortons have amassed about 500 works in their personal collection, some of which find their way to museum collections. Robert Colescott’s painting, “A Stroll Through the Neighborhood,” for example, was given to the California Afro-American Museum, and Barbara Bloom’s installation “Esprit de l’Escalier” was donated to the new San Jose Museum of Art.

About 60 works from the Norton collection recently went on long-term loan to the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica. Fran Seegull, former director of the Luhring Augustine Hetzler Gallery, organized the private exhibition, which will remain on view indefinitely at Rand’s offices.

As the Norton Family Foundation has become better known, grant requests have increased. “We expected to be inundated, but we have found--to our delight--that the volume has not been overwhelming so far,” Norton says. “It’s an emotional load, but not unbearable. The hardest thing is to say no to people you know.”