$1.5-Million Art Donation to San Diego : Philanthropy: Frederick R. Weisman promises to give museum 33 works by California artists.

SAN DIEGO —  A collection of 33 works by California artists worth about $1.5 million has been promised to the San Diego Museum of Art by Frederick R. Weisman, a prominent Los Angeles collector.

Final agreements are expected to be signed in the next few days, according to Henry Hopkins, director of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation.

“While the agreement is not signed yet, it certainly looks very favorable. It appears as though it will happen,” Hopkins said, adding that no money is attached to the gift.

The museum’s board of directors accepted the terms of the gift at a meeting late Tuesday, museum director Steven Brezzo said. Conditions of the gift include a promise that the works will be on view at all times in a special gallery in the Balboa Park museum to be designated as the Frederick R. Weisman Gallery for California Art.

Under the terms of the agreement, the museum would be permitted to occasionally sell works of art from the collection, but any funds derived from sales would be designated for additional purchases of works by contemporary California artists, Brezzo said. Any new acquisitions would become a part of the Weisman collection.

Hopkins expressed cautious optimism about the gift.

“If it transpires, it would be wonderful from my perspective because we feel that San Diego, along with San Francisco and Los Angeles, are the major art centers in California, and the one that doesn’t have a strong representation of California artists is San Diego” Hopkins said. “We hope that this will mean that now all the cities will have strong collections of California art on view at all times.”

All that remains to complete the arrangements is for museum officials and Weisman to sign the contracts, Brezzo said.

Weisman, who was unavailable for comment, is widely regarded as one of California’s most prominent collectors of contemporary and modern works of art. His personal and corporate art collections include more than 1,500 artworks, valued at up to $60 million.

The proposed gift to the San Diego Museum of Art includes paintings, sculptures and mixed-media works by 33 artists, according to Weisman’s curator, Nora Halpern Brougher. “They are all major works. It’s really a wonderful collection,” Brougher said. Pieces in the proposed donation were assembled by Weisman and not selected by the San Diego museum, she said.

Among prime works to be donated are one of Robert Irwin’s untitled acrylic discs, a highly regarded example of California “Light/Space” art; John Baldessari’s conceptual work, “Horizontal Men”; and a “Suitcase” assemblage by Bruce Connor. Works by Sam Francis, David Hockney, Joe Goode, Edward Ruscha, Chuck Arnoldi, Lita Albuquerque, Billy Al Bengston, Alexis Smith and Tim Ebner are also in the gift.

Negotiations on the San Diego gift have been in progress since early spring according to Brezzo. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento were also considered for the gift, according to a source close to the deal.

“I had congenial discussions with Henry Hopkins three or four months ago. We would have been pleased to get those works and integrate them into our collection even though we already have fine examples by most of the artists,” said Earl A. Powell, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

But Weisman wanted the collection to be kept intact in a separate gallery and to be on view at all times. “We don’t do that,” Powell said. “We integrate our collections, so we encouraged the foundation to give the works to a museum that could really benefit from the collection. I think it’s great for San Diego.”

Crocker curator Janice Driesbach said that she knew nothing of a proposed Weisman gift, but she said that Weisman had toured the museum with director Barbara Gibbs, who was out of town and couldn’t be reached for comment.

According to Hopkins, Weisman has also said he will donate individual works and small portions of the collection to other museums throughout the United States, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Other gifts would be smaller than that promised to the San Diego Museum, Hopkins said. Weisman, a car importer and real-estate magnate, began collecting art in 1952 with his former wife, Marcia, also a prominent Los Angeles collector. Marcia Weisman’s brother, Norton Simon, is an internationally acclaimed collector whose collection of Old Masters, Impressionist and Asian art is housed at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.

Working with Hopkins, former director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Weisman continues to collect art for the foundation. He also buys for himself, although the two collections are kept separate.

Weisman, who is 78, has been looking for a home for his collection since the mid-1980s. He first tried to form a museum in his name that would keep the full collection intact and considered several locations. The most promising possibility was the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, but Weisman abandoned that plan in 1986 when the Beverly Hills City Council began discussing the possibility of selling the mansion to raise money for schools.

Since the collapse of the Greystone deal, the foundation has focused on programs in the visual arts rather than searching for a home. One project was a symposium on international art fairs, held last December in conjunction with Los Angeles’ fourth annual art fair. In July, Weisman brought a group of Soviet artists and critics to New York and Los Angeles.

Weisman is currently fighting a buyout of Mid-Atlantic Toyota by Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., the Torrance-based subsidiary of Japan’s largest auto maker. Weisman established Mid-Atlantic Toyota Distributors Inc. in 1970, when Japanese importers began to sell cars through independent distributors, but the Japanese have subsequently bought out most of those distributors to cut costs. Mid-Atlantic is one of only three independent Toyota distributorships remaining in the United States. The company had sales of $1.2 billion in 1989 and sold 82,462 Toyotas, more than 9% of Toyota’s total U.S. sales.