The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 368

ART COUiaORS IN AND AROUND SILICON VALLEY Euphrat Gallery, De Anza College, Cupertino Through April 1 8 BY CATHY CURTIS C' it 1 tilt i 'if i 1 i n-v i one of his columnar women holding a stylized pitcher. The collector, who has requested anonymity, adds with tart appropriateness that he was long active in a planning commission "in the affluent hills of the Peninsula," where, he observed, "there is absolutely no relationship between wealth and aesthetic understanding." To be sure, the exhibit includes its share of work that, to these eyes, shows little of this awkwardly unquantifiable "understanding." One anonymous collector confesses to "walking around with fabric swatches in my hand" to coordinate her art purchases to the decor of her home. know this is not the thing to she adds disingenuously.) There are also people who, though probably able to purchase art that would tickle a connoisseur's fancy, instead enjoy bland sculpture picked out by a friendly art consultant, decorative art that reminds them of events in their own lives or "safe" works by popular artists who have been given the seal of approval by countless museum and gallery shows in tile Bay Area. Two of the most interesting collections included in the exhibit are owned by individuals quite outside the high-tech world. One is Alan Leventhal's group of sculptures and other objects from Third World countries, purchased at the San Jose Flea Market from emigres anxious for ready cash and pleased to be rid of items they no longer wished to store at home.

One piece the San Jose State University anthropology laboratory director loaned to the Euphrat exhibit Is an elegant wood antelope mask headdress made by the Bambara people of Mali during the 1950s. ver since the "robber barons" of the CT 19th century made peace with their CL consciences by founding education- al and cultural institutions, American industrial leaders have contributed to the social and cultural welfare of their communities. Today such corporate involvement is commonplace and has become increasingly vital in a period of reduced government funding for the arts. But, with some notable exceptions, the technology industries of Silicon Valley have not followed this path. Currently, Santa Clara County business and industry contribute less than half the national average to the arts.

Is this simply in the nature of fledgling industries that have yet to don the mantle of noblesse oblige? Does it have something to do with the frantic pace of corporate culture at the high-tech companies? Or might there be other reasons possibly an honest indifference to the arts? Intrigued by this issue, I was pleased to note the title of the current exhibition at Euphrat Gallery, De Anza College, hoping it would reveal a better picture of the current state of Silicon Valley involvement in the visual arts. I hadn't quite reckoned with the rather unconventional approach of curator Jan Rindfleisch. She has assembled a group of highly diverse works in many media, by well-known as well as "unknown" artists, that are owned not only by high-tech companies and the individuals who lead them but also by art dealers, professors and other professionals who live in Santa Clara Valley. Frustratingly, most of the corporate collectors have chosen to remain anonymous, so it is difficult to grasp the involvement of major companies in this field. And the modest size of Euphrat Gallery has precluded more than a tiny sampling of the scope of each collection.

Still, nagging issues of taste and sophistication do present themselves, most revealingly in the essays the collectors have written for the 55-page, illustrated catalog (available for $5 plus $2 postage from Euphrat Gallery, De Anza College, Cupertino, CA 95014). In her own essay, Rindfleisch notes the diverse ways valley residents developed art collections as a consequence of inheriting art, by looking for a new source of investment, through acquaintance with artists (the late photographer Ansel Adams, print-maker Joseph Zirker), to decorate a new home, or simply as a hobby. A lithograph received as a Christmas present led one man to track down the artist in Mexico City. A group of six women, four of whom are married to men in the upper echelons of electronics companies, collect art to be shared among themselves, rotating each of the six "groupings" that constitute their holdings once every quarter. Having gained Femand Legen "Femme a la Silicon Valley Gems "'Jhe other body of works of special note and these are, happily, dis- played en masse are part of the LJ collection of Dr.

M. Lee Stone, an art dealer who has tracked down some of the byways of American printmaking during the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Works like Leon Gilmore's 1939 engraving, "Cement Finishers," with its ennoblement of a WPA crew in charged contrasts of sinewy black line with the brilliant white of the churning cement mixer, or Martin Lewis' "Shadow Dance" (1930), a drypoint on sandpaper that captures a vision of women office workers walking down a city street at dusk, the borders of their silhouetted dresses transparent In the glancing sun, are two of the small delights of this group. The Stones began acquiring such works only in the mid-70s, when prices for their first love, art nouveau posters and prints, soared out of reach. What emerges from the almost bewil-deringly diverse selection of art in the exhibition (and it might have been wiser to show more examples from fewer collections), is a picture of collectors who are feeling their way, some with what they count on to be "expert" advice, others through study, still others by gut-feeling alone.

Interestingly, though hardly unexpectedly, collectors tend to cite the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as an influence rather than the currently beleaguered San Jose Museum of Art (once again without a director) or any other South Bay art institutions. On the other hand, certain commercial galleries on the Peninsula seem to be the repository of great trust and appreciation by South Bay collectors, a situation that is worrisome because it may possibly preclude familiarity with a broader range of artists not represented by those galleries. But the fact remains despite encour- nous pair of interlocked silvery blue, green and purple ovoids (created by vacuum deposits of minerals on the paper surface) that is owned by Chuck Henningsen, vice president of Insulectro in Mountain View. Other art makes scientific allusions, like Paul Pratchenko's "Direction Entrusted to Dipole Phenomenon," a two-panel painting of a man navigating a creek bed with a compass and flashlight, owned by the founder of a Silicon Valley firm whose wife studied with the artist Rindfleisch writes in the catalog that such collections tend to be rotated from home to business office, while in some rare circumstances separate buildings have been erected to house ambitious art holdings. One example of the latter case is the Window South Collection, begun in 1979 at Raychem Corporation id MenlQ.

Park, Visitors to the of this group of 20th-century Latin American paintings. (The collection is, however, open to the public by appointment at Raychem.) In the present exhibit, Gonzalo Cienfue-gas' "La Familia" is an enigmatic grouping of blocky, vaguely Botero-like figures seemingly involved in a menage-a-trois; the stage-set-like interior is cut away to reveal the landscape, where a thinly clad woman rides on a bicycle. Another work on view is a finely detailed drawing by Alfredo Cortena-da, a delicately askew elderly woman whose cheek is embedded in a curious balloon of empty space. Another collector, who works in the semiconductor industry, has taken the trouble to attend "every art course given at De Anza College "Jjis holdings are. represented by an aquatint etcn by Fernnd Leger of background as docents at the Stanford Museum of Art and as students in art history classes at the university, the members of Quixotic as they call themselves started out with lithographs by David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg and have gone on to collect mostly abstract works by California artists.

Among those involved in high-tech fields there is an understandable interest in art that VHi-w tlv reflects new technologies. Euphrat (Mil rget only a tint of the scope See Page 13 "like Larj jjU's ''Vap! jawing," a lujijif TiTn 9.