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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Degas, Study in the Nude for Dressed Dancer, 1879–1917 (model) and 1919-1937 or later (cast) |
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| Degas, Dancer Resting (pastel), about 1879 |
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| Monet, Water Lilies, about 1908 |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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."
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| 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.
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| 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.
Perenchio must have liked paintings of mirror reflections (read on).
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| Magritte, Stimulation Objective No. 3, 1939 |
Comments
Is the Baroque tint oxblood, and the Perenchio tint rust?
The Perenchio room color is not satisfying.
That also showed modern art.
Direct me to that blog. So I can complain endlessly about that.
--- J. Garcin
> The Geffen installation
> doesn't quite include
> everything in the
> Perenchio gift.
That's why Govan and his staffers should have clearly identified the building's grand opening as an exhibit-in-process. But their being unconcerned about that must be due to not minding the museum giving off the impression it has more space than objects to fill it with.
The overstuffed look and format of just about all the major-league museums of the world may be the opposite extreme. But that's better than the look of "we have only one Van Gogh" or "we're Hauser & Wirth hipsters."
However, LACMA has always shown certain creative-technical-aesthetic blind spots. A lack of a big enough budget since 1965 doesn't help, but I also wonder if people at the top even care---ie, J. Garcin's sometimes cited "rubes." lol
For instance, if the donors from 1965-1986 are no longer credited in the design of the current campus (eg, plaque), that's a big goof.
Some of the marble friezes on the walls of the Geffen are also held up by a black metal bar, which clashes with the artwork. Another "WTH?!"
But Govan and his staffers shrugging off matters like that or the public seeing so many *blank* concrete walls (much less the parking-lot-gray look of all of them) must be due to their being rubes. Latte-sipping rubes perhaps, but rubes nonetheless. Oh, well, that's LACMA for you.
However, Zumthor 2026 is better than Pereira 1965. But, okay, even the Museum of Fine Arts Houston 2026 is better than LACMA 1965.
Vuillard's Sacha Guitry in his Dressing Room is astounding. His favorite of mine is at the Kunsthaus, Zurich.
I wish I knew more about Léger.
^ Painting depicted in that architect's rendering of the Geffen, as far as I know, isn't currently exhibited in the building. I don't recall the name of the artist, but the work was bequeathed by the Ahmanson Foundation.
The foundation should have long complained that the Pereira-era buildings (one of them named for their founder) were some of the worse of any museum's in the nation. But the AF was correct in griping that works they've funded through the years wouldn't be on display in the new space.
Even though more of the collection is supposed to be installed in the next several months, I don't trust LACMA's director and staff to do things in a professional way. Such as not minding the museum coming off like a second-rate operation. Sorry for the cynicism, but that's the over 60-year-long history of the place.
Renoir always makes me laugh. I can imagine them created by a very talented middle school student using crayon.
> of the Zumthor building.
I don't know why I had talked myself into not realizing just how unsatisfactory the 1965-1986 campus really was.
Part of that was due to William Pereira in the early 1960s putting together a template that ignored decades of major-league museum design. But once the money had been committed and construction on the site began, it was too late.
Some of those same dynamics coincidentally occurred around the same time in NYC with its Lincoln Center project.
Why former director Richard Brown didn't make Pereira (assuming Brown didn't) do better work is a big puzzle. Then in 1986 the mistakes were further compounded.
When I see old images of the Ahmanson and Art of Americas (former Anderson) buildings east of the Piano-designed canopy and Urban Lights, I cringe. The remaining entry canopy to me looks as flimsy as ever. It always makes me think, "we're on a tight budget."
After Govan became director around 2006, too bad millions of dollars still were spent on modifying the 1965-1986 campus. But people like Eli Broad were already trying to offset the mistakes of 1965-1986---although his own building for LACMA - a lot probably due to the budget - wasn't as good as it could have been.
The good old times weren't necessarily all that good. Which is why if LACMA post-2026 continues to do wonky, funky or flaky things, shame on them.
New York got horribly burned when some of the greatest Baroque masterpieces in history, which had been promised gifts to the Met, instead went to auction when the would be-donors, Mark Fisch and Rachel Davidson, divorced.
Every artwork and space seems to flow into one another… The interior…has a raw appearance... The interplay of soft light and solid form is a breathtaking, almost surreal composition. Most importantly, the minimalist space is calm, almost vacant.
Every single artwork gets equal attention, disrupting the traditional preferential treatment of European or more famous artists. The result is…where every individual piece shines, and it’s not only thanks to the Californian sun seeping in.
Having such an immersive experience, while hyper-personal, is not always easy to grasp… For people less familiar with the museum, the David Geffen Galleries pose a risk of being confusing
The thematic galleries are where the museum’s main concepts of innovation and equality in art are displayed to their fullest extent. The way in which they are constructed is a truly masterful way of visual storytelling that one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. [End quote]
I haven't been in the Geffen personally, but when I do, I have a hunch I'll find it a bit too minimalist and, currently, a bit too vacant.
Museums like the Louvre have interiors so elaborately designed, a person might go, how the heck did they do that?!" Cairo's new Grand Egyptian Museum has spaces that are so large, a person might say, "no wonder it took a lot of years to build!"
The Geffen has areas where I might go, "LACMA's parking garage doesn't seem to have enough stuff for that space over there and there! WTH?"
Sarcasm aside, the irony is that perusing the Geffen will be probably still more interesting (and appealing) to me than browsing the traditional galleries of a Beaux-Arts-enfilade-type museum.
However, I’m admittedly not a connoisseur-type museum goer. Which is why if an out-of-town visitor I know drops by LACMA, I'll continue to not be sure if they happen to see another version of the ghost of 1965-1986 haunting the place.
The better collections tell a story or show a preoccupation with a certain theme/motif.
Not sure I see one here.
--- J. Garcin
I'm in love with the floral still-still-lifes.
Much more dramatic chromatic variations appear in the sun-lit untinted concrete walls along the continuous external wall of glass. At the same time of day, the south-facing walls appear various ash-grays while the north-facing walls assume a much more golden hues. I have now visited the Geffen Galleries three times and have also marveled at how different those untinted walls look in the morning, at noon and in the afternoon as well as the variations during our usually sun-filled days versus our occasional overcast lulls.
Similarly dramatic variations also appear on many of the pieces in those outer galleries. Particularly dramatic are the morning to afternoon variations in Deare's Judgement of Jupiter relief. In the old Ahmanson Building, it always looked flat and static under artificial lights. In the new Geffen Galleries, it springs out to life as highlights and shadows shift across its face.
When you do tour the Geffen Galleries in person, please try to visit throughout at least one day and on days with differing cloud covers. You may enjoy the parade of colors on the untinted walls while also appreciated that each of the three tints do not vary.
With my attention now undivided, I can (hopefully) more cogently mention that you can see a suggestion in NYC of the Geffen's sunlight effects. The Sackler Gallery at the Met lights the Dendur Temple with a north-facing wall of glass and some skylights. If you imagine those illumination effects on steroids, you will have some idea of what awaits in the outermost Geffen galleries.