THE FOUNDERS COLUMN
by Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman

Some weeks ago the foundation received a call from a woman in California who gave us the sad news that her brother, David Clasen, had died of AIDS. She was calling us because David had asked that his personal art collection be given to The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation.

We knew David slightly having met him on two occasions when he came to New York to buy art and once again when we called on him at his art-crammed apartment in West Hollywood a few years ago.

David was a good looking, soft spoken young man who worked hard in the housekeeping business he developed and ran in service to several upscale residences. Through hard work David was able to keep a nice apartment and live the good gay life of a self-sufficient young man in one of the gay meccas of the west. Above all -- he was able to collect the original works of art that he loved.

Where the aesthetic sensibility that makes a collector comes from remains a mystery, but that it exists in an astonishingly wide variety of people is broadly evident. Some collectors seek pastoral charm, others pure abstraction or any of a hundred other imagings. But in the case of David Clasen it was absolutely idealized masculine beauty coupled with the rendering of powerful virility that transfixed his mind's eye. Indeed, the single-mindedness with which he persued such images took on the quality of a kind of worship; a quest for multiple holy grails.

Unlike the organized manipulative collector who buys what he likes -- but only when he feels sure it will appreciate in value -- David bought what he "loved." For him its value never changed. To a critic the collection, because of its intense focus, might seem mono-tonal with its unrelievedly beautiful young men, their physical perfection, the sexual stupenduousness, the absence of what we call realism. David did not want the real. He wanted the absolute of the ideal...It was what David in fact adored and that adoration has resulted in an extraordinarily focused assemblage of homoerotic cum romantic works that greatly enriches the Foundation's holdings.

We did not know that David intended to make this wonderful bequest until after he died and we want to thank his sister, Judy Clasen, and his brother, Scott Fanberg, for so lovingly keeping their brother's trust. We know how scrupulously and ardently they worked to see the collection through to its intended destination. They have our heartfelt admiration and respect.

Let it be known that in the 1996/97 season we will exhibit The David Clasen Memorial Collection at the LLGAF gallery.