 |
SELLING WELL: Demand grows
for works like Guy Rose's A Gray Day, Carmel,
and Granville Redmond's Poppy Field.
Courtesy Whitney Ganz |
when race-car drivers
hit the road traveling from one track to another, they’re
likely to make detours for food, drink and louder forms
of entertainment. But when he was racing professionally,
Whitney Ganz convinced his team to make a pit stop for
art.
His parents—Julian and JoAnn Ganz, both ’51—are
celebrated collectors of American paintings and had
been raving about the masterpieces at the Toledo Museum
of Art in Ohio; Ganz, ’79, wanted to see them
for himself. “The museum probably has more Old
Masters per square inch than just about any museum in
America,” says Ganz, a boyish-looking 48. “So
I had the trailer pull over for a couple hours to check
out the El Grecos.”
That happened in 1982, early in Ganz’s racing
career, but it was a sign of things to come. After racing
professionally for one team after another, and in 1986
setting a still unbeaten record for the fastest qualifying
speed (113.134 mph) at the “Twelve Hours of Sebring”
road race in Florida, Ganz decided two years later to
hang up his helmet for good. He cancelled his racing-magazine
subscriptions. Within a few weeks, he was running William
Karges Fine Art, one of the most prestigious galleries
in Los Angeles.
These days, he is not only the gallery director, but
also one of the leading experts in early California
painting. He specializes in California Impressionism,
the work of a loose group of painters based in in Laguna
Beach, Pasadena, Carmel and other sea-swept locations
in the early 1900s. Many, like their French namesakes,
worked en plein air by setting up easels outdoors.
While popular at the time, their paintings have only
recently become serious subjects for art historians—and
serious business for art dealers like Ganz.
Take the meteoric rise of Guy Rose, best known for painting
highly atmospheric landscapes in France and California.
In the late 1970s, the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art pruned its collection by auctioning off three Rose
paintings for less than $6,000 each. One, A Gray
Day, Carmel, circa 1916, sold again privately about
six years ago, for over $1 million. Or, to use one of
Ganz’s favorite examples, in 1988 he sold “a
very fine” landscape by Rose, also painted in
Carmel, for $135,000. Fifteen years later, he resold
the same painting for $750,000.
“Guy Rose is at the height of the market because
he paints like a pure French Impressionist,” says
Ganz, sitting on the edge of a chair in his Beverly
Hills gallery amid dramatic landscapes and snowscapes
by Rose, Edgar Payne and Franz Bischoff. “He uses
a light, refined brushstroke and likes that hazy look—he
paints like Monet.”
Rose and his cohort are beginning to sell like Monet
too, thanks to growing demand and shrinking supply.
“Since these artists are dead, you can’t
exactly ask them to paint another work for you,”
Ganz quips. “And it can be very difficult to find
this material, especially when so many galleries are
hanging their shingles out on the Internet.”
But Ganz clearly thrives on the competition. Ask him
how he sources paintings, and he sounds like a detective.
He reads footnotes to footnotes in catalogues raisonnés
or calls friends of friends to try to locate a particular
piece, and uses the gallery’s website and classified
ads to cast a wider net for material. The bottom line
is that when someone unearths or inherits a major California
painting, Ganz wants to get the phone call first.
And he often does. “There are less than a handful
of dealers working at his level—dealers who are
not just selling this style but recording it for future
research,” says Jean Stern, director of the Irvine
Museum. “Whitney handles first-rate material,
absolutely first-class.”
Ganz’s competitive streak is what got him into
racing. As a kid, he remembers being moved by the beauty
of a Formula One racing car, with its “sleek,
futuristic, swooping” lines. But he didn’t
really start until his senior year at Stanford, where
he majored in art history. “I must have been on
campus only five or six weekends that year. The rest
of the time I was off racing my Formula Ford,”
a small open-wheel race car that he describes as “great
training for all of us because everyone had the same
car, the same tires, the same engine—it was about
how good you were, not how much money you spent.”
 |
PEAK PERFORMANCE: Ganz clocked
record speed at Sebring in 1986, but he prefers
tracking paintings like Sierra Lake by
Edgar Payne.
Top: Courtesy Whitney Ganz
Bottom: Al Steinberg Racing Photos |
He went pro soon after he graduated, while he was still
young enough to enjoy what he now calls “the rolling
frat party.” But even then the rewards were sporadic.
“I drove for factory teams, like Ford, Jaguar
and Chevy, but I kept on feeling I wasn’t in the
right place at the right time. I got tired of being
on losing teams—of being that actor who does good
work but never gets a big break.”
So how does a race-car driver find a second career away
from the track? Oddly, his new life came through an
old racing contact: William Karges. Before opening his
gallery in 1987, Karges had been a bmw dealer in Santa
Monica, Calif., who sponsored the racing of a childhood
friend, Jim Busby. Through these events, Karges met
Ganz on several occasions in the ’80s and offered
him a job, when Karges turned his art-collecting hobby
into a business.
“Whitney was a very good driver. The fact that
he still owns the fastest lap at Sebring—and you
would not believe how many great drivers have done that
lap since—speaks for itself,” says Karges.
“But what really impressed me was his lack of
ego. He has real honesty and integrity as a person.
He’s the kind of person you’d love to work
with.”
It didn’t hurt, of course, that Ganz’s parents
owned a collection good enough for the walls of the
National Gallery of Art, and that he felt comfortable
around masterpieces as well as the people who own them.
Finally, in 1988, Ganz agreed to go to work—one
day a week. He was still considering other options,
he says, like opening a fly-fishing shop. But he soon
decided to go full time at Karges Fine Art when the
gallery manager up and quit—threatened, Ganz suspects,
by Ganz’s expertise.
Karges and Ganz call each other with leads for paintings,
and to do Monday-morning quarterbacking for their favorite
sport. “When it’s the season, Whitney and
I talk all the time,” says Karges. “We talk
after all the Formula One races,” adds Ganz, “especially
when the driver hits the wall.” |
