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.”
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.”
JORI FINKEL, MA '94, is an art critic based in Los Angeles.
