Go fishing in pop culture for an image of an art collector, and you'll likely reel in a cliché straight from central casting: the collector as an Armani-wearing jet setter hot to track down the perfect complement to his or her designer sofa.
It has been an occasional mission of this column to present examples to the contrary, based on my experience that the Bay area's most devoted collectors are typically people of not-extraordinary means motivated by intense personal convictions about the significance of art, rather than a desire to acquire stuff. Tampa collector Robert Sanchez, whose loans of work to institutions on both sides of the Bay have enabled the realization of two exhibitions currently on view, is a great example.
Sanchez collects with an earnest devotion to the political and social stakes of art making that could come across as quaintly anachronistic in this cynical age of market dominance, or freshly hip and relevant — particularly given our recessionary context. (I like to think the latter.) Turmoil and Triumph at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg showcases his archive of works on paper produced in the years leading up to and during World War II. A smaller exhibition at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in downtown Tampa, Portraits of the Artists and Other Selections from the Collection of Robert and Elizabeth Sanchez, puts faces with names, illuminating such famous practitioners as Edouard Manet and Marcel Duchamp.
Both shows illustrate Sanchez's fundamental belief that art offers a crucial venue for the expression and discussion of ideas and that museums, in exhibiting art, become more than repositories for precious objects.
"It's where we house the potential solutions to a lot of problems," he says.
In more than 70 prints, drawings, posters and watercolors by American artists, Turmoil and Triumph presents a wide variety of perspectives on life during WWII. Some images, like Edward Hagerdorn's gloomy etchings, populated by grotesque characters including a roach-like villain, evoke a sense of impending doom in mythological terms. Others, like a lithograph by Jolan Gross-Bettelheim, depict evil with a more specific symbol: the swastika, multiplied across a row of helmets in a macabre execution scene.
Still others explore life on the home front, often in an optimistic or, at least, bittersweet light. In Thomas Hart Benton's lithograph "Letter from Overseas" (1943), a young woman eagerly reads news from abroad by the light of a lamppost. Joseph Meert's color screenprint "Victory Garden" (1940) exhibits a proto-pop sensibility, rendering a voluptuous garden of vegetables in surreal oranges and greens.
Through their diverse visual styles as well as their more literal narratives, the works on view tell a story of modern art evolving in the United States in tandem with momentous political and economic times. Formal approaches in Turmoil and Triumph run the gamut from abstract and surreal — like the collage of graphic elements in Ben Tarin's "Rise of Hitler" (1937), a mashup of text, swastikas, flames and a ray-emitting eye — to the realism of a pair of Norman Rockwell posters.
For Sanchez, the breadth of the collection suggests a multiplicity of voices speaking from different experiences: a social world of artistic practice that reaches out to viewers in the spirit of conversation.
"[Art] is a form of communication. If it's not communicating anything, what's the point?" he says.
A smaller showcase of photographs at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts pays homage to artists in a more literal sense. Portraits of artists — mostly famous ones — lend faces to iconic names and works. There's Picasso on the beach at Cannes, shirtless and wrapped in a towel, a cigarette perched between his fingers as he gestures beyond the frame to an unseen interlocutor. Or, in a fittingly postmodern twist, a portrait of an image of Andy Warhol on a wheat paste poster in the New York City subway, complete with moustache and goatee scrawled by a passing graffitist. These and other, often unexpectedly awkward or goofy, portraits of genius invite simultaneous surprise (that's him?) and the inevitable search for insights into the artist's work through an expression or a pose.
Perhaps most inviting of such projection is Edward Steichen's atmospheric photogravure of sculptor Constantin Brancusi. The photographer employs his distinctively romantic aesthetic to depict the sculptor as a brooding artistic loner in soft gray tones. Seated in his studio — amid his graceful abstract sculptures, including a version of "Bird in Space" — the tall, bearded Brancusi appears as a philosopher-lumberjack, casually grasping an axe while his downcast eyes suggest a preoccupied mind.
A smattering of other photographs from the Sanchez collection includes a series of images of Angkor Wat, the massive Cambodian temple. Here, again, a theme of interest (the landmark temple) is approached through a variety of photographic technologies over time: from Colonial-era photographs that capture explorers in pith helmets to contemporary images like Mary Ellen Mark's photo of young Buddhist monks or Kenro Izu's breathtakingly ethereal platinum prints of the temple.
Both exhibitions, at the MFA and FMoPA, offer visitors a variety of stories — but, collectively, they also tell a story about the collector. Sure, I could tell you that Sanchez, a lawyer and devoted dad who takes his daughters fishing and gave up corporate life to travel the world with his wife, is a cool guy. But isn't the proof really that he has lent his collection of art to local institutions so that we, too, can share the experiences and ideas he sees manifested in these works? That's one story I'd like to hear more often.
This article appears in Apr 21-27, 2010.