A Modern (and Folk) Gift for LACMA

Jean Arp, The White Leaves, 1946. LACMA, gift of the Maria and Conrad Janis Living Trust

Sitcom actor, jazz trombonist, and gallerist Conrad Janis (1928-2022) has bequeathed a group of 76 artworks to LACMA. Three are now on view in the Modern galleries: a painted wood relief by Jean Arp, an oil-on-paper drawing by Jackson Pollock, and a painting by Jean Dubuffet. 

The bulk of the Janis gift is drawings, prints, and multiples by European and New York Modernists, from Braque and Duchamp to Ellsworth Kelly and George Segal. These reflect the interests of the influential Manhattan gallery established by Conrad's father, Sidney Janis. The donation also includes sculptures by Arp, Claes Oldenberg and Coosie van Bruggen, and Hiroshi Sugimoto; paintings by Stuart Davis, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Alex Katz, and Elizabeth Murray. The earliest work is an iconic Peaceable Kingdom (Pensive Lion) by the American Folk painter Edward Hicks, c. 1846. 

Jackson Pollock, untitled, about 1945. LACMA, gift of the Maria and Conrad Janis Living Trust

Conrad and Sidney Janis, 1960s. Photo by Fred McDarrah

Sidney Janis (1896-1989) made his fortune in the garment trade before realizing his ambition to open an art gallery. There he championed the European avant garde, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and self-taught American artists. Sidney gifted the cream of his collection to the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. By then son Conrad had forged a career as jazz musician and Broadway and Hollywood actor. He played serious roles (mostly with hair) and comic ones (mostly without). Conrad became a ubiquitous working actor on network TV, finding his greatest success in sitcoms. He was the father on Mork and Mindy and a condo neighbor of Frasier's. He juggled his performing careers with managing works by Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselman at the family art gallery. "His knowledge of 20-century art and Modernism was really encyclopedic," said Pace gallery founder Arne Glimcher.

A trust established by Conrad and screenwriter wife Maria, also deceased, has been distributing the couple's collection to museums. In 2023 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts announced a gift from the Janis collection of more than 200 European and American works, mostly on paper. They included 34 early figurative paintings and drawings by Mondrian, 5 Arp sculptures, a painting by Grandma Moses (who?), and seven by Morris Hirshfield (who???—I'll get to that in a moment).

This September the National Gallery of Art announced 12 gifts from the Janis estate. They were two Kiki Smith tapestries, six George Segal prints, three paintings by (yep) Morris Hirshfield and one by Grandma Moses. 

LACMA's collection website provides some information on the Los Angeles gifts, though no images. 

Jean Dubuffet, Table with Foliage, 1951. LACMA, gift of the Maria and Conrad Janis Living Trust

European Modernism

Jean Arp's The White Leaves (top of post) becomes the first of the artist's wood reliefs in LACMA's collection. It joins a marble sculpture by Arp in the Lazarof collection and eight marble or bronze sculptures in the Janis bequest.

LACMA is showing the Jean Dubuffet Table with Foliage alongside the artist's Head with Strong Chin, created the same year and bequeathed by David E. Bright in 1967.

Marcel Duchamp issued a new edition of his Rotoreliefs kinetic sculpture in 1963, the year of his Pasadena retrospective. It includes an artist-designed velvet-covered turntable intended to be mounted on a wall. 

Marcel Duchamp, Rotoreliefs (Optical Disks), 1963. Auctioned at Phillips, Oct. 2022. The Janis Rotoreliefs is from the same edition

The New York School

Two oil drawings and a small painting by Jackson Pollock will bolster the museum's anemic holding of the NY School great, who was expelled from L.A.'s Manual Arts High School. The drawings are dated c. 1945 and 1951. The one on view is spectacular, everything you'd want in a Pollock work on paper of the period. 

The painting, Composition, is also dated about 1945. It's oil and tempera on canvas, 11.75 by 17.75 inches. That is even smaller than LACMA's one drip painting, No. 15 (1950), at 22 inches square. In 1951 LACMA curator James Byrnes was permitted to buy No. 15 for $350, on the condition that he hang it in his office, off public display where it might alarm the citizenry.

The Janis gift also includes a 1946 graphite drawing of a Woman by Willem de Kooning.

Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen, Standing Collar with Bow Tie, 1992

Pop

Mark Rothko and Philip Guston left the Sidney Janis Gallery in protest after it did an early show of Pop artists. The 60s generation of figurative artists became an important part of the gallery's offerings. The LACMA gift includes a sculpture by Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen, Standing Collar with Bow Tie. Forty inches high, it's related to the ill-fated public sculpture planned for Disney Hall in the early 2000s. That sculpture would have towered 65 feet above the sidewalk. Frank Gehry approved, but many critics feared it would disrupt the concert hall's fluid curves. After massive infusions of cash and a lawsuit, the half-finished work was deemed a threat to public safety, and the project was scrapped. At LACMA the Standing Collar joins Oldenburg's Giant Pool Balls (1967) and Typewriter Eraser (1970).

Five drawings by New Yorker cartoonist and illustrator Saul Steinberg represent another kind of New York Pop.

The Janis estate donated these two Morris Hirshfield paintings to the National Gallery of Art: Tailor-Made Girl, 1939, and Cat and Kittens on the Grass, 1943

American Self-Taught and Folk

Sidney Janis was a key figure in the 20th century discovery of self-taught art, framing it as Modernism by other means. Sidney owned Henri Rousseau's The Dream and sold it to Nelson Rockefeller to donate to the Museum of Modern Art. 

Sidney also promoted American "primitives" such as Anna Mary Robertson ("Grandma") Moses and Morris Hirshfield, who began painting at the ages of 78 and 65 respectively. Moses was by far the more popular of the two, while Hirshfield was unquestionably the more weird. Hirshfield, a Polish immigrant in Brooklyn, made women's coats and shoes until he turned to art. Sidney pulled the strings to get Hirshfield a one-artist show at MoMA in 1943, just six years after the artist had first picked up a brush. Duchamp, Mondrian, and Clement Greenberg praised Hirshfield's art, but the public and most critics hated it. 

Over the years Hirshfield's reputation has ebbed, but a 2022-23 exhibition at New York's American Folk Art Museum gave it a jump start. A large proportion of the paintings were lent by Conrad Janis and wife. 

Installation view of "Animal Watch" with Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom (Pensive Lion), center right. At far left is a Morris Hirshfield painting answering to the description of Persian Kitten in a Garden. Photo: Peter Clough

The LACMA gift includes a single Hirshfield painting titled Persian Kitten in a  Garden (1946). Based on circumstantial evidence, I suspect it's the painting at far left in the photo above. This is an installation view of "Animal Watch," a show at Arne Glimcher's 125 Newbury gallery, New York, earlier this year. Glimcher was close to the Janis family and sold off some of their stock after the Janis gallery closed. 

The same exhibition included the Edward Hicks Peaceable Kingdom (Pensive Lion) from the Janis collection. Hicks, a Quaker preacher, produced at least 62 Peaceable Kingdom paintings over a 30-year span. They show carnivores coexisting with herbivores, children mingling with livestock. Many examples have a distant view of William Penn negotiating a treaty with Native Americans, leaving the viewer to decide who was predator and who was prey. (As a Quaker, Hicks admired Penn.)

The early paintings of the series tend to be smaller and often have painted frames with bible verses. Late works of the 1840s, such as Pensive Lion, have more nuanced and world-weary facial expressions for the animals. It's been speculated that the soulful lions of the late works were cryptic self-portraits. Peaceable Kingdom (Pensive Lion) appears to be the most significant pre-Civil War painting that LACMA has added in decades. 

Small detail of Edward Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom (Pensive Lion), 1846-47