Charlie Campbell’s legacy dances on

The Sonoma Valley Museum of Art is hosting an exhibit called "Dancing with Charlie: Bay Area Art from the Campbell Collection.“ The exhibit, which runs through Aug. 28, features works collected by the late San Francisco gallery owner Charles Campbell.

Campbell, who died at age 99 in 2014, was well known for his involvement in the Bay Area art and jazz scenes and his incredibly talented circle of friends. We spoke with exhibit curator Susan Anderson about the exhibit and an upcoming panel discussion about Campbell and his legacy.

Anderson is an independent museum curator and art historian of 20th century American art with a focus on the art of California. On July 16 at 3 p.m., Anderson will moderate "A Conversation with Friends" where high-profile artists and art world insiders from the Bay Area will share their vivid recollections of Campbell, his life and his collection.

The exhibit is called “Dancing with Charlie” because he loved jazz and was known for being an impressive dancer, even in his later years.

“Dancing with Charlie is about that but it’s also about how he sort of danced through life and took people along with him,” Anderson said. “He was very much loved and helped a lot of artists throughout many decades.”

Anderson said she feels that Campbell’s art collection is as important as he is. “He was really kind of a legendary gallery owner because he had a really good eye for talent,” Anderson said. “He was able to pick people out who would later turn out to be central figures in American art and he was very well respected for this.”

Many of the artists that Campbell represented in his gallery were part of the Bay Area Figurative Art Movement in San Francisco.

“The Bay Area Figurative Movement was probably one of the most outstanding movements that came out of the Bay Area,” Anderson said. Many of the pieces in the exhibition are by artists in that movement including Elmer Bischoff, Nathan Oliveira, Paul Wonner, Gordan Cook, Theophilus Brown and Joan Brown.

The Bay Area Figurative Art Movement was made up of San Francisco artists who left abstract expressionism for their own unique San Francisco figurative style. “They drew upon art history and everyday life for sources,” Anderson said. “But because they’d been abstract expressionists it was very grassroots and so still kind of retained the ethos of struggle or self-discovery that abstract expressionist artists had felt was important.”

Anderson said the collection is different from a lot of collections that you’ll see in museums. “It’s a very personal collection that represents a lot of his friendships and even his interest in jazz,” she said. “For people that knew Charles Campbell, it’s especially rewarding to see the collection and read about Charlie’s life.”

Born in Santa Cruz in 1915, Campbell’s parent’s mining interests found him spending his childhood in Siberia and, following the Bolshevik revolution, Shanghai, China. After high school he moved to Los Angeles in the late 1930s. Anderson said Campbell had gotten wind of jazz in Shanghai and sought out the jazz clubs when he got to L.A. “He befriended some of the very big jazz greats like Jelly Roll Morton, Nat King Cole, Art Tatum and he amassed a huge collection of jazz records,” Anderson said.

After World War II he heard that there was a resurgence of jazz happening in San Francisco and in 1947 moved to the Bay Area. “Because he’d had this experience in Los Angeles with jazz and had a huge jazz collection he was seen as a sort of jazz man,” Anderson said. “He got involved in the jazz revival that was happening in San Francisco, became the manager of the Turk Murphy Jazz Band and had his own jazz club for a few years.”

Campbell then opened up The Louvre art supply store and frame shop right near the San Francisco Art Institute. “It was there that he really met all of these people because they would come down from the school,” Anderson said. “He had jazz playing, he had art on the walls and he had all sorts of interesting things going on so it became sort of an artist hangout. That’s how he got to know a lot of these people that he later became the art dealer for.”

Campbell liked helping people. In his shop he would trade with artists. “Many of them were just coming out of art school,” Anderson said. “He would frame pieces of their work and they’d give him a piece of art.”

He wasn’t just helping people, he was befriending them. “He was sort of the kind of person that knew instinctively how to interact with artists and musicians,” Anderson said. “He wasn’t a musician or an artist, but he sort of was one of them. It was partly that unusual upbringing I think, that made him such an open person. He was just able to meet somebody and become fast friends.”

For the panel discussion Anderson has pulled together a group of Campbell’s friends who can speak to different aspects of his life. Some are artists and some are art world insiders. They include Michael Tompkins, Grace Munakata, Matt Gonzalez, Jeremy Stone and Barbara Janeff. “They will talk about their years with Charlie, what he meant to them and what they think his legacy in the Bay Area is,” Anderson said.

“Charlie was a fascinating person and he was humble and a very lovable person,” Anderson said. “That’s what makes it interesting too, he was just an uncommon human being.”