Los Angeles
The Nortons are somewhat atypical collectors. The fifty-five year-old son of an insurance salesman from Seattle, Peter Norton spent five years as a Zen monk before starting a career as a computer programmer. In 1983 he formed his own firm and made a fortune selling Norton Utilities, a programme that retrieved lost information from computer disks. He sold that company to Symantec in 1990 and left the software industry, which has produced many fortunes, but few art collectors.
“American wealth normally has three phases, which are usually lived out in three successive generations: making a fortune, using it, dissipating it. We wanted our life to encompass the first two phases”, he told the Los Angeles Times.
Soft-spoken and unpretentious, Mr Norton met his wife Eileen after she answered a personal ad he placed in a newspaper. Mrs Norton is black, which may help explain the Norton’s taste for art that addresses racial conflict. The Nortons began collecting with the works of Los Angeles artists in the early 1980s. “We have a one-vote policy. If either of us votes for a piece, we buy it”, Peter Norton told an interviewer.
“We virtually never buy at auction”, Mr Norton added, “our joke is that we don’t buy used art. We don’t buy high-ticket items.”
The Nortons have also been active in philanthropy, focusing their support on projects considered “too weird” or “oddball” for conventional funders. The Norton Family Foundation, which the couple established in 1989, has given away more than $1 million annually. David Ross, now director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, called the Nortons “America’s model millionaires.” Critics describe them as earnest, but somewhat naive in their pursuit of contemporary art’s cutting edge. The Nortons are known for their annual Christmas projects, gifts which they commission from contemporary artists and send to a list of friends.
In May, Peter and Eileen Norton acquired the 700-work collection of the advertising entrepreneur Clyde Beswick. Since their collections overlapped somewhat, Mr Norton announced that he would give significant portions of the merged holdings to museums.
Mr Norton admitted that the reported $1.5 million he paid for Beswick’s art would have been double if the works had been on the open market, but the Beswick Collection was for sale, not by Beswick, but by the State of California, which had seized the works early last year. It turned out that the collector, much praised for his courage in collecting works that challenged sexual repression and gender and racial biases, had bought the works of art with money stolen from business associates.
In September 1997, a court convicted Beswick of embezzling funds from Brody Smythe Direct, the direct-mail firm that he founded, and sentenced him to two years in prison. Beswick served eleven months in prison on that charge and is now living in a halfway house in Los Angeles. The proceeds from the sale will go to satisfy claims from Beswick’s creditors and to a financial settlement with his ex-wife, Karen who sued him for divorce in 1996.
“We’ve known Clyde’s collection for a long time. It paralleled ours and they intersected a lot. We knew him as a smart and brave and intelligent collector. So we just naturally jumped at the opportunity to buy it wholesale, to buy the entirety of it”, Mr Norton said, when he was approached about acquiring the collection by Stuart Regen of Regen Projects, a Hollywood gallery representing the court that had been given an exclusive right of negotiation, a fact that kept competitive buyers from bidding up the price. “As far as I know, no one else was immediately interested and with the resources to be able to do it”, Mr Norton said.
Beswick’s collection included works by Nan Goldin, Nayland Blake, Catherine Opie, Lari Pittman, Raymond Pettibone, and others.
One example of Beswick’s “courage”, Mr Norton said, was a work by Catherine Opie, a confrontational lesbian photographer known for her self-portraits. “The absolute toughest, which he bought a year before we had an opportunity to, was ‘Pervert’—Cathy herself done up in s/m high drag with dozens of needles penetrating her skin and a leather mask covering her face.”
The sheer size of the Norton collection led to the idea of culling it for the benefit of institutions without resources to acquire art. “We’re just feeling our way into it. We do not have a fully developed plan”, Peter Norton said. The basic idea, he explained, “had occurred to us four or five years ago. Then all of a sudden, the 1,600 that we had has now become 2,300, or 2,400. It’s really ripe for some careful selection and pruning.”
Some works “of significant economic value” may be sold, Mr Norton says, but he expects to assemble groups totalling 500 to 1,000 and give those “bundles” to museums. Among the candidates are institutions now borrowing works from Norton’s collection—the Armand Hammer Museum, the Henry Gallery (Seattle), the Cambridge Municipal Art Center (Massachusetts), the Power Plant (Toronto), as well as university museums elsewhere in the US.
“All the stuff that we weed out is going to be, in economic terms, of little value, and in aesthetic terms, interesting, but not important”, Mr Norton said. Tom Solomon, who formerly owned a gallery in Los Angeles from which the Nortons bought, will supervise the selection.
Peter Norton now sits on the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art (and on committees at the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art), although he doubted that the Whitney would be interested in any of the works he plans to donate to museums. He is a former trustee of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “It’s been a notoriously uneven relationship”, he said, although he denied that he parted company with MoCA after the museum refused to host the exhibition, “Black male”, a thematic show about African-American masculinity supported by the Norton Family Foundation, which made its debut at the Whitney. Some critics attacked that exhibition for strident political correctness.
In Southern California, where most museums are built on the holdings of a single collector (Norton Simon, Huntington, Getty, Armand Hammer) the Nortons have no intention of following that practice. Nor will they limit their gifts to the region where they have given money and loaned much of their art. “Regional chauvinism does not interest me”, Peter Norton said, “there is not a pressing need for young contemporary artists to get exposure here. But we’re hoping to look at southern California just as eagerly as anywhere else.”