"You have to be careful when you read things. Most of what you read is wrong, anyway," Jack Rutberg responded to a question I had asked regarding a magazine article about him and his gallery. "If you ever read an article about something you know about, you will be staggered at how wrong it can be."
Rutberg was showing me his current exhibition for a review I was writing. I was beginning to feel apprehensive of his outspoken mistrust for writers. Having frequented his gallery for years, I was eager to portray it accurately, but was starting to question whether or not that would be possible, from his perspective.
Jack Rutberg Fine Arts exudes a peculiar magnetism. During my first visit, I was struck by its stark contrast to other commercial galleries I'd visited in Los Angeles, both in terms of the work shown and unusual exhibition format. Affecting the venerable yet welcoming atmosphere of a museum where everything is for sale, it's one of the few commercial venues where one can see a well-curated show by a contemporary artist and an exhibition of works by deceased luminaries like Picasso, Rivera, and Rauschenberg, all in a single visit.
Discussing his gallery's beginnings, Rutberg adumbrated the roots of his unique perspective shaping his charismatic establishment.
Gallery Foundations
Born in Belgium, Rutberg emigrated to the United States at the age of ten. His parents were well-to-do in Europe before WWII. After losing everything in the war, they arrived in America as poor immigrants. Rutberg's father ended up as a laborer in the garment business; his mother was a homemaker until he and his two siblings were old enough to function on their own. Then she, too, went to work in a factory.
"So I have some sort of European sensibility in terms of old world appreciations," Rutberg concluded proudly of his early life.
He discovered art while involved in multifarious business ventures. "I was doing all kinds of things. I was doing entrepreneurial, helping friends start businesses. When I was in high school, I got involved in cosmetology because I was early on, a model." Collecting and studying prints originated out of relative practicality.
"I had no background whatsoever," he said of his initial interest in art. "In my very early 20's, I was wanting to basically decorate my apartment. I bought a few prints."
These acquisitions intrigued him so much that he wanted to learn more about them. "So I got a book--well, actually more than one book. I started reading about art, and a whole world opened up ... it was history, philosophy, social dynamics of different periods; and all of these worlds converged. And it was a fascinating world."
Soon, his voracious curiosity about art evolved into a full-fledged avocation. "I didn't have the resources to be a major collector, but I had certainly the resources to learn. And I bought little things, and I met other people with interests, I met dealers.
"In any event, this hobby got out of control," he continued. "I started doing private dealing for an art dealer who saw my particular fascination and passion, and worked on me a very long time to join him." That dealer was the Florence-born, San Francisco-based, Pasquale Iannetti. Rutberg started as a Los Angeles satellite to Iannetti's San Francisco operation.
"In a matter of months, I was made a partner, because I became integral to this," Rutberg declared. "Within six months' time, I gave my first lecture at a museum. I never looked back."
For about eight years, he continued dealing privately in Los Angeles in tandem with Iannetti in San Francisco. Specializing in prints from old masters to early moderns, Rutberg operated by appointment only, meeting clients in their homes or institutions. Much of his business consisted in selling to galleries.
"When my wife was about to have our daughter, I knew I couldn't work in the house anymore," he said. He considered dealing from a small office, but ultimately decided to open a gallery. "At that point I was representing Hans Burkhardt, and I knew he needed a public forum. He was too major an artist to try to do this privately and I wanted a public space."
He focused on La Brea Avenue. Scattered art-related establishments were moving into the area, which at the time housed mostly car dealerships and craftsmen. "There was a gallery that opened on La Brea that was being subdivided into different galleries. I looked at it, and I didn't like the situation. But driving by, I saw this building, which from the front was all glass. It used to be a car dealership in the 30's. It's been all kinds of things, a lumber warehouse, a toy warehouse. And I looked at the sign and walked in just for fun, and before long, I went from wanting a tiny little office to opening what at the time was probably the largest gallery space in LA. That was in late 1981. And the rest is history. I've been here so long I think they're going to call us one of the La Brea tar pits."
Jack Rutberg Fine Arts' inaugural show opened in 1982, featuring paintings and drawings by Arshile Gorky and Hans Burkhardt from 1928-37, the years they shared a studio.
"Late in '37 when [Burkhardt] came to LA, he really represented a critical artistic link to what came to be known as the New York School," Rutberg asserted. "He was a critical link from the New York moderns to LA. He brought with him an amazing collection of Gorky works. And he himself had a huge history which I was fairly ignorant to." Born in 1904, Burkhardt was looking to unload some of his collection of Gorky works, as well as works by himself.
To enhance both artists' output, Rutberg posited Burkhardt's works in the back gallery as a projection beyond Gorky's life, illustrating where Gorky might have gone had he lived longer. In total, the exhibition evinced the commonality between the two artists' work, up to the point of Burkhardt's deviation to Los Angeles.
Evidently, Rutberg's early mentorship with Pasquale Iannetti had provided him ample education. The show was a success, and led to Rutberg's enduring exclusive representation of Ruth Weisberg, who reviewed the show for Artweek Magazine, and whose recent show at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Art Park had impressed him.
"The Municipal Gallery has an amazing history of remarkable shows," Rutberg gushed. "It was very important in simpler times. There was no LACMA. LACMA only came on board in the mid 60's ... they were in Exposition Park; they shared the space, it was called the Los Angeles County Museum, and it was a museum of natural history and art. So, Barnsdall had a huge impact in this city." Rutberg bemoans the fact that once a significant force in the Los Angeles art scene, the public facility has receded into relative obscurity.
Exceptional Ideas
Despite having lived in Los Angeles since the age of ten, Rutberg laments the city's attitude toward the past. "LA has a way of obliterating its own history," he complained. "History has no traction here. ... Things have no meaning. If the past hasn't been valued, the present has no relevance. People are so interested in the next 10 minutes, but how do you value something if you don't know what the last 10 minutes were like?"
He feels that this transience is magnified in Los Angeles, though characteristic of the larger art world. "The connection to history is really the thing that connects all great art, I think. That's why an awful lot of art that's being made today may not survive. I don't think much of it deserves to, frankly.
"I do love contemporary art, and I do want to be relevant to my time. And I collect contemporary art. But not for its own sake. It's just if you come onto something."
Rutberg's self-taught individuality is evident in his uncommon, often reactionary, opinions regarding the mainstream art world.
He credits LACMA's Graphic Arts Council, a now-extinct organization that conducted educational lectures about prints, as instrumental in his early self-directed art education during the 1970's. According to Rutberg, membership dues were not prohibitive; but the organization eventually fell by the wayside in favor of exclusive societies less focused on instruction:
"Over the years, these councils started to lose their mission. Education became secondary to fundraising. The reason some of these councils have been obliterated is they've tried to make this some sort of high-society, very expensive patronage, to be a member ... and they made their dues so prohibitive that people revolted."
He readily denounces venerated institutions and artistic vogue, championing instead the unfashionable.
"The art world has been corrupted by institutions, top to bottom, by virtue of media. The problem is, media and institutions--academic institutions and museums-- are all in lockstep. They're all seduced by people," he proclaimed. "If I knew nothing about art whatsoever, and I invented a widget and suddenly had a billion dollars to my name ... [and] I give money to LACMA, I can be invited to parties, and I can be with artists and other creative people, and my own ignorance will drive me. And when I put my arm around the museum director and say, 'Hey, Jeff Koons is the Vermeer of our time,' I'm not going to get a lot of pushback, because I'm holding that $6 million check in the other hand."
On one hand, Rutberg avows that the art world has greatly changed over the past several decades. On the other, he repines that volatility of artistic fashion is nothing new. As an example, he contrasted Rembrandt's art falling out of public favor with the idea of people paying exorbitant sums over botanical infatuations during the Dutch tulip craze. Rutberg's own example seems much like the contemporary brand of consumeristic volatility that he declaims.
Still, he insists, the production and appreciation of art have altered fundamentally since yesteryear.
"Initially, art was about the muse and art history, be it contemporary or ancient history; about the discovery of something, of creative process," he averred. "As soon as it became a fund raising mechanism of trophy-hunters, it lost its meaning and lost its scholarship, too, because the people that were joining were not necessarily, any more, people that had a knowledge of art. They just wanted to belong."
His reverence for art history is belied by a deep cynicism for its transmission.
"Art historians have always gotten it wrong. That's just a reality. If you go back in history and get a book that was published more than 30 years ago, you'll be shocked to hear the declarations and who was being championed and how many are still standing or even considered."
Predilection for Prints
Traditional printmaking processes are becoming lost arts, practically outmoded by cheaper, easier, and quicker methods of reproduction; as well as artists' lack of interest in learning and practicing them. It's possible to earn both a BA and an MFA in painting without taking any classes in printmaking. As an artist myself, I know that many painters see printmaking as too time-consuming, tedious, and deficient in immediacy. Some love it. However, when given the choice, many students will avoid enrolling in printmaking classes.
The archaism of printmaking is almost indisputable. Indeed, Rutberg talks about printmaking as if it were dead. He exalts its qualities in mostly the past tense.
"The beauty of printmaking as it had been--I make a distinction post 60's maybe--was that you could develop connoisseurship," he said, going on to extol prints' characteristic as "multiple originals." Because of its multiplicity, the same work can be compared and analyzed by various people in different locations. "With a singular work, once it passes through my hands, I may never see it again. With prints, the multiple original factor of it meant that it was a more democratic art form, more than one person could own it."
When he speaks of printmaking in the present tense, it is mostly of its demerits.
"I happen to have a great love of prints," Rutberg avowed. But his affection is tempered by overall aversion to recent output. "I'm not so taken with contemporary prints, because I don't think there's a lot of great contemporary printmaking," he said simply. "I think so much of it has turned into a mechanical commercialization. You know, printmakers did prints trying to exploit the nuances and qualities of lithography or etching, what have you. It wasn't a means of merely doing mechanized reproductions of paintings. That wouldn't interest me. And today the computer has opened up an awful lot in printmaking.
"I recently had to jury some national print competition. ... The show that I was able to pull together, out of the thousand or whatever number of images I saw, was actually quite fine. But I was staggered at the mediocrity that was coming through that I had to choose from. I wanted to slit my wrists and run in the other direction, initially."
He feels that a loss of connoisseurship on the part of collectors has contributed to printmaking's decline.
"The art world has been taken over by consumerism. When I started, it was directed by connoisseurship. So I would be in awe of these people--their knowledge and collections and the way they could argue and compare and it was a world of discovery," he said, referring mostly to his early experiences in LACMA's Graphic Arts Council. "Today, it's like, 'I've got my Mercedes, or I've got my Rolls-Royce'--it's a different dynamic. That's not to say there isn't a passionate collector out there, there is. But they've been overwhelmed by the consumers and trophy hunters and investors and all of that. ... As we lost a sense of connoisseurship, [prints'] special attributes were really kind of overwhelmed by sensationalism."
As a reformative gesture, "I try to always have some prints on the wall, hoping to re-engage people," he said.
A Profitable Museum
It initially seems ironic that a gallerist who champions contemporary printmakers and sells prints to collectors who obviously value them should maintain such polemical opinions with regard to both artists and purchasers alike, albeit as general categories. Yet Rutberg's mission for his gallery seems to lie at the crux of this apparent paradox. He conducts his gallery as if it were a profitable museum guided by his reactionary ethos. In promoting artists whom he feels are uncommonly worthy, he caters to what he regards as collectors with rare discernment; all while seeking to attract new supporters whom he can educate to appreciate the former category, and ideally direct towards inclusion in the latter.
He frequently holds panel discussions and readings that advance education while promoting his gallery. He produces and publishes promotional books and catalogs. In them, he compiles already published essays and reviews in order to betoken the exhibitions' importance and economically affect scholarship.
Furthermore, he only shows museum-quality art. "Everything in this gallery, be it hundreds of dollars or hundreds of thousands, everything is worthy of at least being gifted to a museum ... although museums are no longer the meter of accountability and merit, I think."
I asked him how he determines whether or not a work of art is worthy of being collected by a museum.
"They already are," he answered. "There's not an artist that you see on these walls that's not collected by museums in some fashion ... there's not an artist that we've ever shown that's not already in some fashion in some museum collections."
That he denounces museums for their consumeristic sensationalism yet respects their discernment so much that inclusion in museum collections is a hallmark of the artists he shows is another irony that, though initially puzzling, may be integral to his ethos. Though he does not say so, Rutberg seems to want to make up for museums' deficiencies.
"Museums are under tremendous pressures and that level of connoisseurship is not even addressed because they're burdened by box office and sensation. And we're all burdened by that in a sense. I have collections of things that I'd love to show, but I fear for whom am I going to show them for? I'm not a museum that gets funded."
His secondary market dealings help support his expansive exhibitions. "In the gallery, I am one of two things: I am a champion of artists, and I am a seller of works of historic relevance," he explained of his dual practice. Aside from his main galleries, he maintains a smaller showroom of walls dotted with eclectic assortments of prints and drawings that advertise his availability to broker pieces on the secondary market.
Though remunerative, he finds his secondary dealings less gratifying than his exhibition program.
"I have sold works, let's say, by Frank Stella," he said. "I can sell it with great conviction and authority. But I could have never been his champion. It doesn't speak to me. [Except] as historical artifacts of contemporary art. But I don't have this attraction to Frank Stella. I would almost say the same to you about Matisse; he's not my guy. I have seen pieces that bring me to my knees, but very rarely. The totality of the work doesn't move me as does Patrick Graham or Hans Burkhardt, for example."
Discovering Artists
Rutberg staunchly adheres to his chosen artists, speaking of them with a reverence that occasionally borders on fanaticism. They frequently intersect in his tapestry of interwoven anecdotes. For instance, he described how he began representing Irish painter Patrick Graham. In the 1980's, Rutberg helped an Irish gallery enter a Los Angeles art fair at the recommendation of Vincent Price, one of Rutberg's collectors. Traveling around the art fair in the company of Burkhardt, who met most other artists' work with scathing disdain, Rutberg was amazed that Burkhardt was actually impressed by Graham's show in the Irish gallery's booth. Rutberg offered to show whatever the gallery didn't sell at the fair. Visiting the art fair separately, Weisberg had also been impressed by Graham's works but had not had a chance to study them. Later bemoaning the fact while lunching with Burkhardt and Rutberg, she was surprised when the gallerist informed her that he had picked up Graham's works for his next show.
Rutberg systematically scours art fairs in search of new discoveries. "When I go to an art fair, I'm a hunter. It's not a place to find a quiet experience. I look even in booths that I'm not interested in, because I'm a dealer in art ... I look at even galleries where I hate what they're showing."
He effusively described his strong emotional response to Jordi Alcaraz's work upon spotting it in a Spanish gallery's booth at a fair. He bought out the show and worked out a deal with the Spanish gallery to represent Alcaraz in the United States.
I asked him how, as in the case of Alcaraz, he recognizes that art is undervalued. How does his personal response to art translate into financial valuation?
"Everything we do, in some respects, is opportunistic, trying to seize upon opportunities," he avowed. " And hopefully they're opportunities that are meaningful, not calculated ... I don't think there's ever been calculation on my part in terms of what I show. I try to show things that I'm respectful of, and there are people who respond to that. I can't be there for everybody."
But given his sentimental approach, when he appreciates a certain artist, how does he know if his collectors will respond in kind? He replied that trusting his own intuitive response is generally effective.
"There's always been a response from the public. Some shows, you do better than others. Some shows you don't sell, some you do, but your rewards come in different ways," he explained. "Every gallery has what's called the front room and the back room. Tomorrow, I might sell that Matisse painting in the back. And broker a Matisse painting that helps me subsidize the things that I want. I don't chase fashion."
His principal criteria are nuanced evocativeness and lasting significance.
"For an artist to be here, they need to be able to walk that course, that continuum of art history," he concluded. It's difficult to apprehend his interpretation of that art historical continuum, given his belief that art historians always get things wrong.
Yet Rutberg is clearly doing something right. Last year, he mounted the first exhibition uniting the work of Jerome and Joel-Peter Witkin, artist twins who had been estranged for decades. The show was so successful that it inspired two films and a forthcoming show at a museum in Mexico City. This is just one accomplishment of a gallerist who, without a formal education, has developed a remarkable perspicacity.
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