Profile of a collector: Tom Arneson (Minnesota art since 1880)

Walking through Tom Arneson’s art collection is like stepping into a condensed history of Minnesota art. His 9th floor apartment is hung salon-style, from floor to ceiling. Pieces by Works Progress Administration-era artists Clara Mairs and Clem Haupers share walls with contemporary painters like Barbara Kreft and Jim Denomie. One of the oldest works, a ship on a stormy sea by Peter Lund (1884), sits on the couch. In the entryway, works loaned last fall to the Minnesota Museum of American Art for In Her Own Right lean against the wall, not yet unpacked, the wall space they once occupied quickly filled during the run of the exhibit. Flatfile boxes hold prints and drawings by artists known and unknown. On the walls hang Glenn Hanson, Kristie Bretzke, Malcolm Meyers, Frances Cranmer Greenman, Elof Wedin, Adolf Dehn—and more. Subjects include rural scenes, portraits, and abstraction. What ties the diverse collection together is a focus on our particular corner of the Midwest and how history is reflected therein.

Second in a series of five profiles of local collectors. First in the series was a profile of Jay Swanson, collector of contemporary local art.

Tom’s emphasis on Minnesota, historically “sort of a cultural backwater,” is inspired by the fact that Tom grew up in Fairmont. He’s always had “a stream of interest in things local [because of] how important local stories are to the self-understanding of a town and its people.”

Near the entryway hang two unassuming landscapes by a relatively unknown artist: his grandmother. “She had a knack for arranging things,” he says, though he never expected to find a stash of canvases in her basement after her death in 1978. “It was very Norwegian-American not to talk about those things!” The paintings, views from her Atwater farmhouse, are quintessentially Minnesotan.

For Tom, art is not only the work, but the life of an artist. Blue Road by Elof Wedin, which hangs in his living room, exemplifies this. Wedin worked for the WPA, but supported his family working as a pipefitter, a career which led to his death by asbestosis. How Wedin balanced his family and artistic life fascinates Tom. Elof’s son, Gary, told him about a family road trip during which Elof was so particularly taken with a bend in the road in Black Hawk, Colorado, “he sent the boys to go out hiking, and went back with his pastels.” Later, in the studio, he completed an abstract pastel and the large canvas based on that sketch, both of which now hang in Tom’s home. Gary, an artist himself, gave Tom the sketch that inspired it all. “How he blended his family life with his art, and how his abstraction was not from nothing—actually informed by reality, yet two steps removed,” is what, Tom says, typifies his appreciation for art.

Tom’s collection policy is “representative” rather than comprehensive. Though its focus is narrow—Minnesota art since 1880, approximately—it is still a wide and under-collected field. His aim is to have excellent examples of each artist historically relevant to Minnesota, similar to the encyclopedic focus of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, but on a much smaller scale.

“The idea of people using their creativity to put something of themselves into what they’re making” is what interests Tom. Before fine art, he collected fine craft. He asks, “Why use something poorly designed when people make things with great care, style, design and quality?” In fact, in the pre-Internet era, Tom published a sort of yellow pages for artisans, called the North Country Artisan Guide. Fine objects, such as ceramics by Warren MacKenzie or Richard Bresnahan, are still displayed throughout his home.

Collecting art is something Tom thinks more people should pursue: “What I would like to see is people buying things they really like and connecting with the artists. It doesn’t take a lot of money to get something you like. It doesn’t seem part of the ‘Minnesota way’ [to collect art], sad to say.“

Tom’s approach to collecting is heavily based on research. Because Minnesota’s art history is so undocumented (such as books, etc), his best resources are gallery files (especially those of older Minneapolis galleries), the Minnesota Historical Society, and often the artists themselves. Meeting artists such as Bettye Olson, and hearing first-person accounts of Westlake Gallery, one of the first Minneapolis galleries, and the 1950s milieu is something a collector of New York artists would probably not have the opportunity to do.

What is the future of a collection like Tom’s? Surely a local museum would be interested in it, but those sorts of arrangements typically take a large donation, many meetings with curators, and the result is usually none of the works donated ever being displayed. Additionally, the local institutions that could be appropriate venues currently have other priorities (Walker: Contemporary non-local, MIA: encyclopedic, non-local for the most part) or simply have no room (MMAA, MNHS). However, Tom might be the best curator, guardian, and tour guide this collection may ever have. He’s heard the stories of the art from the artists themselves or the people who knew them, and can speak eloquently of the aesthetics of his collection. In this case, the collector is the expert.

Tom says he doesn’t buy the contemporary stuff “unless I am really moved by it…[so it’s] much more an expression of myself.” A few pieces from Jim Denomie’s recent MAEP exhibit grace his walls, as do works from Circa Gallery and Bockley Gallery. When collecting art from Minnesota’s past, it is somewhat simple to figure out who embodies their era. It is more difficult to determine that for our own time, and the lack of “historical perspective” makes the more contemporary additions to his collection much more subjective, and in some ways more interesting. What connections does he draw between the work of George Morrison and Jim Denomie? How does Clara Mairs compare to Kristie Bretzke?

Tom’s collection combines a respect for artists and craftspeople, an interest in how historic events and trends impact a locale, and a real fascination with where those aspects collide—the confluence of “history, personal expression, creativity, and beauty.”