LACMA Collectors Pick $2.5 Million Worth of Art

Tokio Ueyama, Untitled (Still Life with Persimmons), about 1924. LACMA, gift of Kelvin Davis and Hana Davis through the 2025 Collectors Committee. (c) Museum Associates/LACMA

LACMA's 2025 Collectors Committee defied a whipsawing stock market to buy $2.5 million worth of art. Though that's less than last year's total (just under $3 million), the latest round of purchases is laser-focused on leveraging the collection's strengths ahead of a new permanent collection wing. The acquisitions include a collection of Indonesian textiles assembled by a former LACMA curator; a Max Beckmann bronze self-portrait formerly in the Robert Gore Rifkin collection; a self-portrait by a pioneering woman artist (whose likeness is already in the LACMA collection); two precursors of Spanish Colonial casta paintings; a half dozen works by Japanese-American modernists. Cézanne was a foundational figure for Japanese-American artists on the West Coast. At top, Tokio Ueyama astonishes with persimmons.

Unlike other large museums, LACMA has virtually no endowment for acquisitions. The Collectors Committee is a group of LACMA supporters who meet annually to buy art for the museum. Curators pitch potential acquisitions, and then committee members vote. Artworks are purchased in order of popularity, until everything is bought or the collective bankroll is exhausted. Members can also dedicate special funds to buy favored works, guaranteeing their acquisition. That happened this year when Kelvin and Hana Davis supplied funds for works by three Japanese-American artists. 

Textiles from the Mary Hunt Kahlenberg Collection, Indonesia. LACMA, gift of the 2025 Collectors Committee with additional funds from Jackie and Jeff Schaffer. Photo (c) Bruce M. White

Among the buys is a group of 101 Indonesian textiles collected by former Costumes and Textiles Department head Mary Hunt Kahlenberg. Assembled over nearly 40 years, they include seven of the earliest known Indonesian textiles, radiocarbon-dated to the early 15th to late 17th century. 

Virginia Vezzi, Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1624-26. LACMA, gift of the 2025 Collectors Committee

American museums are pursuing works by women "Old Masters." New to the LACMA collection is a Self-Portrait as Catherine of Alexandria by Virginia Vezzi (a.k.a. Virginia de Vezzo). Vezzi was friends with Artemisia Gentileschi and studied with French Baroque painter Simon Vouet, who became her husband. LACMA already has Vouet's portrait of his wife, in the guise of Mary Magdalene. It is only recently that art historians have reconstructed Vezzi's career, aided by prints of the artist and her work by Claude Mellan. At age 24 Vezzi gained membership in the Accademia di San Luca. One of her paintings, a Danae, was the subject of a sonnet. Praised by Louis XIII, she gave drawing lessons at the Louvre. Vezzi's short career (she died at 38) is a reminder that many women artists had successful careers under the patriarchy. It was art history that forgot them.

The LACMA painting is one of Vezzi's key works, appearing at the top of her Wikipedia page. It was recently on offer at Robert Simon Fine Art. 

Manuel Arellano, Creole Woman from the City of Guadalajara, about 1710. LACMA, gift of the 2025 Collectors Committee with additional funds from an anonymous donor. Photo courtesy of Colnaghi, Madrid 

From colonial Mexico are two paintings by Manuel de Arellano. They are described as early forerunners of casta paintings, the puzzling (to us) genre depicting mixed-race families with taxonomic precision. It appears that casta paintings were mostly sent to Spain. They satisfied curiosity about the American melting pot while reassuring viewers that racial hierarchies were being maintained, with white Spaniards at the top of the pyramid. The two paintings here depict creoles, persons born in the Americans with European or mixed ancestry. The banderoles and theatrical dress suggest the sitters are less individuals than case studies. Manuel de Arellano (with father Antonio) also painted one of LACMA's most popular devotional paintings, a Virgin of Guadalupe purchased in 2009.

Manuel Arellano, Creole Man from Mexico City, about 1710. LACMA, gift of the 2025 Collectors Committee with additional funds from an anonymous donor. Photo courtesy of Colnaghi, Madrid 

Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait, 1936 (modeled) and 1968 (cast). LACMA, gift of 2025 Collectors Committee with additional funds provided by the Buddy Taub Foundation, Stephanie and Dennis Roach, Directors, the Law-Warschaw Foundation, the Wayne Family Foundation, and the Walske Foundation. (c) Artists Rights Society. Photo (c) Museum Associates, LACMA

Max Beckmann produced just eight sculptures. Perhaps most admired is the anxious, larger-than-life self-portrait head he modeled in 1936 Berlin. Six bronze casts were produced, all posthumously. Five are in the museums of St. Louis, New York (MoMA), Leipzig, Hamburg, and Munich. The sixth had been owned by the Robert Gore Rifkind Foundation and put on "permanent loan" to LACMA. Permanent loans never are, and the foundation sold it. It was offered for sale by Grisebach GmbH, Berlin.

LACMA has another Beckmann bronze, Adam and Eve, plus four paintings and over a hundred lithographs, drypoints, and drawings. 

Tokio Ueyama, Creeping Shadows, 1924. LACMA, gift of Kelvin Davis and Hana Davis through the 2025 Collectors Committee. (c) Museum Associates/LACMA

The Davises funded purchase of two works each by Tokio Ueyama, Chiura Obata, and Miné Okubo, none of whom were represented in the collection. Each was a West Coast modernist of Japanese-American heritage whose career was interrupted by wartime internment. Ueyama's Creeping Shadows (oil on canvas, 32-1/4 by 41 in.) was shown at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1926. 

Chiura Obata, Eagle Peak Trail, 1930. LACMA, gift of Kelvin Davis and Hana Davis through the 2025 Collectors Committee. (c) Estate of Chiura Obata, photo courtesy of the estate

Obata achieved early fame with an all-American subject, Yosemite. His Eagle Peak Trail deepfakes a watercolor. It's actually a color woodblock print produced at a Tokyo workshop. 

Chiura Obata, Untitled (Cliff with Lone Tree), 1945. LACMA, gift of Kelvin Davis and Hana Davis through the 2025 Collectors Committee. (c) Estate of Chiura Obata, photo courtesy of the estate

Cliff with Lone Tree is an authentic watercolor made on the artist's drive back to California from internment and exile. 

Miné Okubo, Untitled (Portrait Head), about 1937. LACMA, gift of Kelvin Davis and Hana Davis through the 2025 Collectors Committee. (c) The Miné Okubo Charitable Corporation. Photo (c) Museum Associates/LACMA

Miné Okubo is best known for Citizen 13660, her graphic novel of interment camp life (subject of a 2021 exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum). Before the war, Okubo studied in Paris with Fernand Léger and assisted Diego Rivera on WPA murals. The Portrait Head and Sunday Morning owe something to Léger's and Rivera's pneumatic figures. Sunday Morning is tempera on masonite, 25-7/16 by 21-1/2 in. 

Miné Okubo, Sunday Morning, 1937. LACMA, gift of Kelvin Davis and Hana Davis through the 2025 Collectors Committee. (c) The Miné Okubo Charitable Corporation. Photo (c) Museum Associates/LACMA

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sea of Buddha 049 (Triptych), 1995. LACMA, gift of the 2025 Collectors Committee

The artistic interchange between Japan and the U.S. continues to the present day. Hiroshi Sugimoto, who studied at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design, was represented at LACMA by two photographs from the Theatres series. The Sea of Buddha series was shot in a 12th-century Kyoto temple containing 1001 Senju Kanon figures. Sugimoto wrote: "The New York art scene in the 1970s was dominated by minimal and conceptual art, experiments in visualizing abstract concepts. It occurred to me that similar motives inspired the making of art in twelfth-century Japan."

The Beckmann Self-Portrait is to go on view in BCAM's modern galleries shortly. For the rest, you're likely have to wait until the opening of the David Geffen Galleries in April 2026.