LACMA Receives Perenchio Collection + Bonus Gauguin

Paul Gauguin, Otahi, 1893

LACMA's collection website indicates that the museum has received the long-anticipated art collection of TV executive Jerry Perenchio (1930–2017). The gift of 48 Impressionist and Modern artworks spans paintings by Monet, Pissarro, Caillebotte, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Léger, and Magritte; sculptures by Carpeaux, Degas, and Jasper Johns; finished pastels by Manet, Degas, Cassatt, and Vuillard; drawings by Picasso and Matisse; a chess set by Max Ernst. Forty-eight is one more than the 47 works that Perenchio promised. New to the gift is Paul Gauguin's Otahi, a painting as notorious for its eroticism as its role in a recent art market controversy. It becomes LACMA's only Tahiti-period Gauguin.

Perenchio's promised gift, announced in 2014, was conditioned on the timely opening of the Peter Zumthor building, then projected for 2023. Construction delays have led to concern that a missed deadline might scuttle the bequest. The gift has been described as LACMA's biggest ever donation of art, and its value was put at half a billion dollars (in 2014 dollars, and not including the expensive Gauguin). 

Otahi was one of the works purchased by Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitri Rybolovlev in his famous buying binge. Rybolovlev bought quickly and didn't sweat the price. He got buyer's remorse when he learned that Swiss dealer Yves Bouvier had paid only $80 million for Leonardo's Salvator Mundi before flipping it to him for $127.5 million about 2013. 

Rybolovlev had paid nearly as much for Otahi, $120 million, also via Bouvier. Despite its modest size (something over 19 by 28 inches) it was the most expensive Gauguin ever sold at the time. Even today, Wikipedia estimates Otahi to be the 27th most expensive painting of all time, in inflation-adjusted dollars. 

That comes with an asterisk. Rybolovlev, who was going through a messy divorce, sold Otahi through his Virgin Islands trust. The price was less than $50 million, a staggering loss. Rybolovlev decided he had been duped. He filed suit against Bouvier and deep-pocketed Sotheby's for allegedly participating in a scheme to overcharge him for art. 

In a decade-long series of lawsuits, courts of multiple nations sided with Bouvier and Sotheby's over Rybolovlev. Caveat emptor, and all that. Rybolovlev undercut his own case by reselling Salvator Mundi to Badr bin Abdullah al Saud for $450 million, copping a much bigger profit than those he was accusing Bouvier of.

It now appears that Otahi was Perenchio's last great purchase. The LACMA website does not have an image, but the Wildenstein Platner Institute's catalogue raisonné lists only one Gauguin painting by that name, and its dimensions and date coincide with those given on the LACMA site.

Perenchio may have been the anonymous collector who lent Otahi to the Portland Art Museum for a few months in 2015, a tactic that is often used to avoid paying sales taxes. Elaine Wynn did the same, also anonymously, with her Francis Bacon triptych in 2013–2014.

Otahi means "alone." With its isolation and implied voyeurism, the nearly nude figure has been interpreted as an homage to Degas' bathers or a taboo depiction of sexual submission. Gauguin deplored the effects of colonialism in Tahiti, oblivious to the posterity would see him as an embodiment of it. Otahi's minimalist landscape is as much a paradox as the figure that nearly blocks it out. Going by the Wildenstein image, the sherbet colors and shadows showcase Gauguin's skills as a colorist.

Otahi was extensively exhibited and published in the 20th century. It inspired a 2006 Vik Muniz photograph simulating Gauguin's painting as a heap of powdered pigment. However, aside from the Portland showing, it has not been seen publicly since a 1993 exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay. 

Paul Gauguin, Fruit Dish on a Garden Chair, 1890. LACMA, gift of Merle Oberon

LACMA has four other paintings by Gauguin, all probably made in Brittany. Fruit Dish on a Garden Chair was a gift of mid-century movie star Merle Oberon. Of part Sinhalese and Maori ancestry, Oberon concealed her Asian/Polynesian heritage in order to make it in Hollywood.

ICYMI: It's hard to overstate how much LACMA's collection of European modernism has been transformed by gifts announced or realized in just the past few months. Five separate donations of single works or whole collections have given LACMA its first Tahitian Gauguin and Cubist Picasso, plus its first-ever paintings by Manet, van Gogh, Klimt, Schiele, and Bacon.