Dolores Dietler will be parting with some old friends Thursday – about 80 of them, in fact.

The local art collector is putting her collection of works by renowned artists Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Maija Peeples and others up for auction at Sacramento's Jay Jay Gallery.

The reason for the parting?

At 84, Dietler is struggling with bladder and kidney cancer and is moving to a local Eskaton retirement center from her large Sierra Oaks home.

Dietler's collection includes rare and early works, including Arneson's ceramic "Alice's House" as well as "Rob Roy Cup," a rare ceramic collaboration between Arneson and De Forest.

"The early Arneson work is very important," said Lial Jones, director of the Crocker Art Museum. "And the "Rob Roy" piece – that's extremely rare; those two artists did only a few collaborative works."

For Dietler, whose husband of many years recently died, saying goodbye to the collection is a gut-wrenching affair. As a surgeon, Patrick Dietler was gone often. His absence left his wife with a lot of time to build and bond with her collection, especially after their two sons left for college.

"I used to walk around the house and look at my art ... and I'd talk to it," she said. "I used to tell my art that I was glad to have them, that they were my company, my world."

To accommodate them, Dietler built one of her hallways as her own personal gallery space.

"I had art on both sides, and I had art in every room," Dietler said. "My husband used to joke that the only place left to hang art was the ceiling.

"Now all that's gone."

The divestment of art is frequently a trying time for collectors, Jones said.

"The action of acquiring things ... it's part of a very personal relationship," said Jones. "They (collectors) think of it almost as child. It's a product of their lifetime."

Indeed, Dietler is less concerned about the financial outcome of the auction than she is about whether the works will go to homes where they will be prized.

She indulged her art interest in the late 1960s by baking cookies and cupcakes for art openings at the seminal Candy Store gallery. That gallery exhibited and sold art by what was then an up-and-coming group of teachers and students from the University of California, Davis, and California State University, Sacramento.

It was from that group that the likes of Arneson and De Forest arose. And, it was those artists whose work Dietler began to collect.

"I paid out of my grocery money for pieces," said Dietler. The low-wattage nature of the purchases was evidenced by the fact that gallery owner Adeliza McHugh kept Dietler's account on recipe cards.

At the time, Dietler's cash allocation for art purchases was $20 a week.

"That was a lot of money back then," she said. "Once I started collecting, I just couldn't stop."

The first piece Dietler bought was Arneson's "Little Alice's House."

She paid $500 for it.

"I didn't buy any of these artworks for investment. I did it because I loved them," Dietler said. "I had no idea they would ever grow in value."

But grow in value they most certainly have.

These days it is not uncommon for a large Robert Arneson bust to sell for between $20,000 and $30,000 at auction.

Beth Jones, owner of Jay Jay Gallery, did not want to speculate on what the collection might bring at silent auction because the vagaries of the art market and the economy can skew prices. The auction will be a first for Jay Jay, which will receive a percentage of the sale.

"Reselling art, unless you have blue chip internationally collectable work, is difficult to speculate about," said Beth Jones, no relation to the Crocker's Lial Jones.

No price can ever be enough to Dietler to make her feel good about parting ways with one of her favorite works.

"All I want is to be able to keep my Gilhooly frog," Dietler said. "But I can't keep it, because I'm afraid one of the workers where I now live might break it."

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