The Abstract Businessman

The British critic Sir Kenneth Clark wrote once that he understood a certain private collection of Fragonard's rococo oils when he looked at the same owner's collection of butterflies. The collector's eye had plainly drawn strength from the kinship of fragrant, fluttery forms in art and nature. To pin down the taste of California Entrepreneur Norton Simon, 57, the most discriminating art collector on the West Coast (see color pages), is a similar exercise in analogy. But Simon's other collection is companies.

He began as head of Hunt Foods and Industries, the world's largest packer and distributor of tomato foodstuffs, and has since branched out into half a dozen businesses from Ohio Match Co. to McCall's magazine. He seeks controlling stock in other firms in hopes of improving them, and, says one museum curator, "in the same way he picks up a company that could be doing better, Simon makes a good painting more important by adding it to his collection." By hanging it in the company of centuries of masterworks, even Simon's Rembrandt gains character as a personal choice, and returns the compliment to Simon's spread from Lorenzo Monaco to De Kooning. It is no coincidence that Simon speaks like an existential philosopher and terms himself an abstract businessman: he seeks man's fulfillment of self in art and business.

Agony in a Yawn. A hallmark of the collection is its focus on the well-painted picture with perfect brushwork. Nothing among Simon's pictures looks unfinished or sloppy. "Simon's primary consideration is esthetic quality without regard for periods," says Richard Brown, director of the Los Angeles County Museum. "And he lives with it just that way, hanging a Van Dyck alongside a Gorky in his office, a Memling alongside a Degas at home. This takes courage and taste, because it means holding the bat full length, not shortening up."

Another hallmark is Simon's eye for restrained treatment. His Gorkys are unflamboyant, his late Van Goghs un-despairing. But the peaceable appearance of Simon's art masks the tough reality within. As Brown explains it, Simon has "a sympathy, an understanding, a desire to recognize agony in life," and Simon himself, a self-made intellectual who quit college after six weeks, considers "the facts of life and cold reality as bona fide subjects of art." The yawn of Degas' laundress conceals the agony of poverty and weary boredom.

Buying Art Slowly. Just as he painstakingly analyzes a business investment, Simon buys art slowly. Often, he will study a painting for a year before acquiring it. His collection began ten years ago with a Bonnard, broadened into other 19th century postimpressionists (he owns twelve Degas, nine Cezannes), yet is not slavish to any one style. He scattered Picassos throughout his William Pereira-de-signed administration building in Fullerton, Calif., and then smoothly turned to Renaissance painting.

Along with Dun & Bradstreet reports, file drawers in his secretary's office are stuffed with Wildenstein catalogues, Parke-Bernet auction lists, and color transparencies. On his desk sits a tiny Daumier bronze of a humble country bumpkin. He also wants his employees to appreciate art, gives them plenty to look at. Rarely have they failed to enjoy it, but once he had to take down a Leger tapestry of a mechanical man in the office foyer. Employees read themselves uncomfortably into the image.

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