It's known as one of the world's best private art collections, and a Tuscaloosa multimillionaire wants to share it

Art for all to see

Sunday, January 23, 2005

THOMAS SPENCER

News staff writer

Retired from his family business, Gulf States Paper Co., multimillionaire Jack Warner, 87, often can be found wearing tennis shoes, sitting in a red leather chair in the midst of his collection of masterpieces at the Warner-Westervelt Museum on the rocky cliffs overlooking Lake Tuscaloosa.

There are patriot portraits, frontier landscapes, Old West and Civil War battle scenes, and Impressionist idylls, painted by the greatest American artists: James Peale, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, James Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassat, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keefe and Andrew Wyeth.

"It is the finest privately held collection of American art in the world; I can say that without reservation," said Gail Trechsel, director of the Birmingham Museum of Art. "What I love about it, too, is it gives this wonderful view of American history. Jack Warner has a great eye. People are never prepared for the quality."

Warner is constantly rearranging, pairing paintings that share a theme or are connected through history. He has a missionary drive to share the message he hears from the paintings he's spent four decades collecting.

From noble founding fathers to the Edenic dawns of frontier landscapes to the ethereal illumination of American Impressionists, Warner sees America's allure and promise, a special quality of light that suggests divine blessing, a gift of land and purpose.

"God told us it was ours from sea to shining sea," Warner said. "We made the land bloom."

The museum, opened to the public in 2003, is tucked away in the back of the North River Yacht Club, an unusual resort/conference center/marina/golf course/country club and housing development that also is a product of Warner's imagination and his millions.

A new career:

Now this flag-waving, self-described right-wing patriot; this 6-foot-3, free-spoken force of nature who made his living turning trees into paper, paper bags and cartons, is going into business as a hotelier.

Last week, the Jack Warner Foundation officially took over the 56-room lodge adjacent to the museum on the bet that it can turn the hotel and museum into a profitable venture that draws art tourists to this obscure spot outside Tuscaloosa.

Even with Warner's formidable collection gathered in one place, supporting the museum and the lodge will be a challenge.

Ever since Gulf States developed North River, the company has subsidized the operation of the lodge, the Yacht Club and its associated amenities. The company, now under the leadership of Warner's son, Jonathan, wants to end the subsidy.

Some in Tuscaloosa believe Warner's collection would be more visited and would have greater spin-off benefits if it were located downtown rather than in a museum off the beaten track, within the confines of a private development complete with a guardhouse at the entrance.

Further, the lodge has never operated for profit. Out-of-town members and members' guests fill it up on football weekends. But occupancy is less than 30 percent, week-in and week-out.

And though the elites of the art world know Warner's collection by reputation, Warner and the museum's executive director, Susan Austin, feel people in Alabama don't appreciate what they have. "People don't know how lucky we are to have this collection here. It's a national treasure here in Alabama," Austin said.

Improbable collection:

In the shadow of portraits of his hero, George Washington, Warner gets lost in his paintings. Intently studying a 17th-century painting of a colonial wedding, Warner points to details. "See, she's throwing a shoe. That's what they did. ... You can see something new every time you look at it."

In the colonies, he continues, there were just 4 million people, most living within 30 to 40 miles of the coast. A nation populated with second sons and debtors and criminals took on the most powerful military on the face of the earth, and won, Warner says.

"It was the most improbable thing that ever happened."

As improbable, perhaps, as an art collection, which some art experts believe is worth in excess of $100 million, getting its start in the bottom of a brown paper bag.

In 1902, Warner's grandfather, Herbert Westervelt, patented a machine that created the modern paper grocery bag, the flat-bottomed sack that opens with a flick of the wrist. In 1928, the E-Z Opener Bag Co. moved from Indiana to Tuscaloosa to take advantage of fast-growing Southern white pines and abundant water. It set up the first modern pulp and paper mill in Alabama and reincorporated as Gulf States Paper.

Family visionary:

Warner's mother, Mildred Westervelt Warner, was herself an original, a woman running a major heavy industry through the Depression and into the 1950s. She started the Warner collection with decorative art such as ornate French clocks, plus neoclassical and Duncan Phyfe furniture and silver serving pieces, some by Paul Revere.

Taking over for his mother in the 1950s, Warner grew the company from a one-mill, one-product operation making grocery bags into a supplier of wood, paperboard and packaging products produced and distributed around the United States. Today, Gulf States is one of the nation's largest privately held forest-products companies.

In art, Warner also expanded his mother's vision. During World War II, Warner served in Mars Task Force, a commando group that combined Americans, Japanese-Americans and people of the Burmese hill country. They operated behind enemy lines, attacking Japanese supply operations.

"We walked 450 miles over the highest mountains in the world. Water would freeze in our canteens," Warner said.

He came back with a taste for tribal art and Asian architecture. After taking the helm at Gulf States, he helped design the company's Tuscaloosa headquarters on the model of a Japanese Imperial Palace. With soaring ceilings and glass walls, the complex is suffused with natural light and centers on an interior Japanese garden complete with peacocks, koi and black-necked swans. He decorated it with totem poles, masks, sculpture and Audubon bird prints.

Eclectic design:

The North River Yacht Club development, constructed in the 1970s under Warner's watchful eye and active hand, is a swirl of Oriental styles and architecture. The landscape is populated with a collection of life-size bronze lions, tigers and elephants that look like they lumbered out of Rudyard Kipling stories. Add to that a nautical theme. The roads are lined with massive ship chains with anchors. Cannons are poised in strategic locations.

The Yacht Club is decorated with ship steering wheels and fog lights, steam whistles and brass bells. The lodge has the feel of an exotic hunt club, decorated with the stuffed heads of big-game animals.

Coming from the flatness of Tuscaloosa, the landscape is also a surprise. The Yacht Club and museum sit on high bluffs with dramatic views. To reach the museum from the lodge, guests walk across a suspension bridge above a steep, rocky and wooded ravine down which streams and waterfalls flow to the river, a fitting entrance to an art collection rich in landscapes.

Perhaps the most famous piece in Warner's collection is Thomas Cole's "The Falls of Kaaterskill," a painting that appears frequently in art history textbooks. Painted in 1826, it's a dramatic landscape of falling water and cliffs, dramatic sky and wilderness, with a tiny solitary Indian brave at the center. It is the ideal of an unspoiled American frontier, but it hints that civilization is coming. The brave's days are numbered, his fate foretold by the enduring remains of a dead tree beside him.

Warner's art is historically significant. In a time before television and photography, the images helped create America's sense of itself and its image to the rest of the world. In a portrait by Robert Edge Pine, George Washington holds himself like a Roman general.

Warner, a graduate of Washington & Lee University, studies it intently. "He was America for 22 years. ... He knew he was posing for history," Warner said.

Some paintings suggest a connection between young America and the classic civilizations of Greece and Rome. Others, like Edward Hicks' "Peaceable Kingdom," suggest a biblical connection rendering America as a new promised land.

And there are the dramatic landscapes that beckoned settlers West. Warner points to a pair of Sanford Gifford landscapes that were the centerpieces of a recent show at Washington's National Gallery and New York's Metropolitan Museum. "That was how the inevitability of America was implanted," Warner said of the work.

Inherent contradictions:

Warner is untroubled by the contradictions inherent in the art, the admiring portraits of American Indians painted as they and the wilderness were being eliminated. Noble they may have been, but the spread of the United States across the continent -Manifest Destiny, as politicians of the 1840s called it - was the will of God, Warner said. Warner also displays numerous works by William Aiken Walker, old South plantation scenes with blacks in tattered clothes in the cotton fields. Many critics and historians view Walker's work as romanticizing sharecropping and poverty. Warner sees the paintings as Dickensian realism. The subjects are resilient, happy in spite of their hardships. "Sure they're poor, but these paintings are complimentary," Warner said.

From patriots and pioneers, the collection moves westward. Warner says he has "arguably four of the best Westerns ever painted."

But there is also plenty of delicacy and beauty. Warner was an early collector of American Impressionism. "I bought that one for practically nothing 30 years ago," Warner says of a painting by Childe Hassam. "No one knew about him."

American Impressionists are gaining in value on the French Masters, and Warner has the best of the Americans - Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent. Unsurprisingly, Warner sings their praises. "Americans get light. They got light better than the French."

Warner receives constant visits from art dealers who are either trying to sell him something or buy or swap something out of the collection. Gerald Peters, a prominent dealer in Western art, was working on Warner last fall. "It's the best 19th-century collection in America. It's unrivaled. It's fabulous. It is better that most museum collections," Peters said.

And Warner continues to add. In December at a Sotheby's auction in New York, Warner won the bidding at $625,000 for another Thomas Cole. He came back from that auction with ammunition. Donald Trump and Bill Gates are buying art, Warner preached to his son on a visit to the Gulf States headquarters. Sotheby's sold a John Sergant, inferior to one in the Warner collection, for $24 million, the elder Warner said. "Keep your assets. Don't sell. That's crazy," he counseled his son.

There has been buzz that the current management would like to divest itself of the company's art holdings. While Warner personally owns some of the pieces, as does the foundation, the majority of the collection is owned by the company.

Good investment:

Gulf States spokesman Dan Meissner said the art may have been an unconventional investment for a paper products company, but it has been a good one. "The company-owned art is a significant investment asset, and that asset has appreciated quite nicely through time. Gulf States' board of directors and management recognize, in addition to the intrinsic value of the collection, its value as a cultural and educational resource that draws countless numbers to the west Alabama region every year. And the company has every intention of maintaining this important asset for the foreseeable future."

With the company pushing the North River development toward self-sufficiency, the Warner Foundation's tiny staff is trying to figure out how to run a hotel, raise the profile of the museum and build its membership base.

Susan Austin said she understands some people would rather see the collection in a more central location, but then visitors might not get the real essence of the museum. The collection and the man and the landscape are inseparable. "Jack Warner is unique, eclectic, eccentric. His canvas is the landscape," Austin said. "The whole complex was this one man's vision."

Warner's latest project is a re-landscaping of the back yard of his mansion at North River. Warner and a crew of workers have collected the skeletal remains of cedar trees from the shores and woods around Lake Tuscaloosa and dragged them to his bluff, where they were re-erected in concrete. The yard is crisscrossed with winding paths of sandstone, and he's even had a structure built that looks like the ruins of a Spanish mission.

The trees recall early American paintings in his collection. In nearly every one, in the midst of the verdant frontier, there is a dead tree. The artists seem to be reminding viewers of the cycle of seasons and cycle of life.

What does his garden of dead trees mean to Warner? Mortality, Warner intones, sonorously. Life is fleeting. But art endures.

E-mail: tspencer@bhamnews.com

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