LACMA Debuts Perenchio Collection

Installation view, "The A. Jerrold Perenchio Collection of Impressionist and Modern Art"

In 2014 TV executive A. Jerrold Perenchio (1930–2017) promised the core of his collection of Impressionist and Modern art to LACMA. At the time the coverage focused on the financial value of the gift, estimated at half a billion dollars and said to the be museum's largest ever. LACMA followed up the next year with an installation of six Perenchio works on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. Among them was Degas' At the Café-Concert: Song of the Dog, a prized gouache/pastel/monotype.

LACMA published a catalog of the full Perenchio collection in 2016. But the works remained unseen by the public until the Geffen's opening. One deep-red room is showing nearly all the Perenchio paintings and sculptures and a few drawings. 

In his varied career "Jerry" Perenchio managed recording artists and promoted prize fights (Muhammad Ali v. George Frasier, 1971). He co-produced a string of sitcoms with Norman Lear, starting with All in the Family. Perenchio lived in a sitcom mansion himself, the one used for exterior shots in The Beverly Hillbillies. His film productions included the sci-fi classic Blade Runner (1982). Perenchio's most lucrative venture, however, seems to have been the Spanish-language network Univision. 

The Perenchio gift is LACMA's most important in the Impressionist-Modern field since the Janice and Henri Lazarof gift announced in 2007. The Lazarof collection is larger (130 objects v. 48 for Perenchio) with more artists, major and secondary. But the Perenchio gift has a higher proportion of star pictures. That includes the aforementioned At the Café-Concert; three Monets spanning a Water Lilies, a landscape, and a flower piece; and Gauguin's Otahi. 

Like many of his generation, Perenchio favored the boldface names of the School of Paris. This resulted in a few dull choices—a small Renoir and a very late (1974) Chagall. But unlike many Hollywood collectors, Perenchio had the funds and ambition to spend when major works came on the market. He acquired a Cézanne; three Pissarros; two Bonnards; two Légers; two Magrittes; drawings by Picasso and Matisse; small sculptures by Carpeaux, Degas, Maillol, Max Ernst (a chess set) and Jasper Johns (a light bulb). The collection brings multiple "firsts" to LACMA, among them the first paintings by Caillebotte and Kees van Dongen; the first Fantin-Latour still life.  

Degas, At the Café-Concert: The Song of the Dog, about 1876–1877

At the Café-Concert was formerly in the collection of Louisine Havemeyer, most of which was donated to the Met. The Havemeyer family sold Café-Concert and Waiting, a pastel, in the early 1980s. The Getty and Norton Simon Museum pooled resources to bid successfully on Waiting. That cleared the field for Perenchio to win At the Café Concert. The performer is Emma ("Theresa") Valadon, who did a bawdy novelty song imitating a dog. 

Degas, Study in the Nude for Dressed Dancer, 1879–1917 (model) and 1919-1937 or later (cast)

Degas, Dancer Resting (pastel), about 1879 

Monet, Water Lilies, about 1908

Monet, The Artist's Garden, Vétheuil, 1881

The Artist's Garden, Vétheuil, is one of four versions Monet painted at his summer home in a Parisian suburb. An identically sized (just over 39 by 32 in.) version is at the Norton Simon Museum; a larger picture is at the National Gallery of Art; still another is in a private collection. The Perenchio painting is distinguished by a cloudless sky and two children on the steps. 

Monet, Asters, 1880

Monet seems to have regarded his still lifes as a side hustle to make quick cash. But his bouquets of sunflowers prompted van Gogh to take up the subject.

Henri Fantin-Latour, Dahlias, 1890

Fantin-Latour's Dahlias underpromises and overdelivers, as the bouquet includes roses, hollyhocks, nasturtiums, and gladiolus. Ruth Edwards, the French artist's dealer in England, used the title These are the Flowers of Middle Summer. 

Gauguin, Otahi, 1893

Gauguin's Otahi was formerly in the collection of Russian industrialist Dmitri Rybolovlev, who paid an astonishing $120 million for it. Not part of Perenchio's 2014 promised gift, it was added to the LACMA bequest. Otahi means "alone," and Gauguin seems to have been inspired by Degas' pictures of solitary bathers. Charles Stuckey wrote that Otahi and related works "attempt to answer the challenge that obsessed early French realists including Degas, for whom the careful observation of the back of a figure… could be potentially as revelatory of personality, status, and social history as conventional frontal pose."

Gustave Caillebotte, A Soldier, about 1879

Caillebotte also painted solitary (male) figures from the back, but A Soldier draws on Manet's Fifer and its flattened background. 

Fernand Léger's Study for Reading and Woman with a Bouquet, both 1924

These two paintings are prime examples of the pneumatic style Léger adopted in the 1920s. LACMA's other paintings by the artist are earlier, more Cubist-derived.

Picasso, Head, 1909

Pastels by Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec (oil on board), Manet, and Cassatt

Edouard Vuillard, Sacha Guitry in his Dressing Room, 1911

This may be the most theatrical of a group of Perenchio works relating to show business. Alexandre "Sacha" Guitry was an actor and playwright who commissioned portraits of himself and his wife. Vuillard reduces his sitter's face, the usual requisite of portraiture, to a Felliniesque smirk in a hand mirror.

Perenchio must have liked paintings of mirror reflections (read on).

Paintings by Kees van Donegan: Before the Mirror, about 1911, and Dolly, the Painter's Daughter, about 1912

Louis Vauxcelles, the French critic who coined the term fauve, considered Kees van Dongen to be the wildest of that wild bunch. The picture plane of Van Dongen's Before the Mirror is to be understood as the slinky woman's mirror (prefiguring Luis Camnitzer, in a way). The background is a Fauve cube with a saturated red wall and charcoal gray floor (not too unlike the room you're standing in).

René Magritte, Dangerous Liaisons, 1935

Magritte's Dangerous Liaisons is likewise a picture of a woman melding with her mirror image. Draw your own connections to social media and AI agents. The picture's gold-toned frame puns on the painted mirror's frame. Maybe the joke is on all of us, barreling towards a Black Mirror future as surreal as any painting.

The Geffen installation doesn't quite include everything in the Perenchio gift. Omitted is Toulouse-Lautrec's virtuosic portrait of Jane Avril, essentially a drawing in oil paint, and Léger's Women with a Parrot, a glazed ceramic mural larger than Matisse's La Gerbe. The Léger was designed in 1952, the year before the Matisse, but not cast until 1989, after the artist's death.

Magritte, Stimulation Objective No. 3, 1939