A Dab of Luck on LACMA’s Palette

Luck, according to the Roman dramatist Seneca, is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. If so, Los Angeles is the luckiest city in the world for Modern art right now.

Preparation just met opportunity, and the stunning result is “Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings From the Collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer,” which opened this week to a jostling media throng at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Only one question hangs over the show: How long will the luck hold out?

The exhibition continues through June. But all five paintings are quietly for sale, preferably to a museum. One is a towering monument of Modern art.

This is a powerful test for LACMA. The museum has embarked on a $145-million expansion plan and hired a new director -- Michael Govan, who began work just this week -- expressly to become the only encyclopedic museum in the nation with a major program in Modern and contemporary art. Almost preternaturally, the Klimts arrived as if made to order for achieving the goal. We are about to discover the depth of LACMA’s sincerity and ambition.

Acquiring the works will not be inexpensive. And you can bet that billionaire cosmetics heir Ronald S. Lauder -- whose private Manhattan museum of German and Austrian art, the Neue Galerie, would go from cult favorite to international sensation if it owned the Klimts -- is waiting in the wings. Surely there are others.

There are five paintings. Two are full-length portraits of Klimt’s great patron, Adele Bloch-Bauer, and three are landscapes. They span 1903 to 1916. (Klimt died at 55 in 1918.) As a group their power radiates outward, like ripples from a stone dropped into the pond of Modern art.

At the center is the singular 1907 tour de force, “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” among the greatest early Modern paintings now in the U.S. For LACMA it ranks as a destination work -- the kind one travels just to see -- comparable to Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art or Marcel Duchamp’s “The Large Glass” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

As a pair, “Adele I” and “II” create a captivating dialogue of Klimt’s artistic trajectory at an unparalleled moment -- a conversation centered on the Jewish patron critical to it. Together they begin to tell the heady story of Vienna as a profound social, intellectual and artistic engine driving modern culture before World War I.

Finally, as an ensemble the five paintings articulate almost the full arc of Klimt’s 20th century career. (His architectural murals, of course, are absent.) Yet they also extend the story even further: An Austrian tribunal in January resolved a long-simmering lawsuit -- nearly 68 years after the Nazi regime plundered these paintings -- and returned them to their rightful owners, the family of L.A. resident Maria Altmann.

The narrative now encompasses the entire century -- the radiant flowering of European Modernism, its collapse into fascist anarchy, the rescue of art and artists and the long, slow process of cultural redress.

How often in an art museum does one encounter a veritable anthology like that? The prospect for a permanent LACMA gallery for this astounding group of works is extraordinary to contemplate.

Why is the 1907 portrait so significant artistically? Think of it as a hinge -- a pivot between a moribund, impossibly constricted world about to vanish forever and a new one whose contours could only be imagined.

With an exquisitely rendered image of a pretty, contemplative and artful young woman -- his likely lover -- the artist transformed an illustrious classical myth into a metaphor of creative ecstasy. Adele is Klimt’s Danae.

In the ancient myth, the beautiful princess Danae was locked away in a bronze tower by her father, who had been warned by an oracle that one day her son would kill him. The randy Zeus -- a god who loved a challenge almost as much as sex -- devised a way to get to the imprisoned virgin. He transformed himself into a shower of gold dust, seeping through cracks in the ceiling and enveloping, irradiating and impregnating her.

Painters from Titian to Edward Burne-Jones painted the Greek myth, at times casting the characters in their Roman guises. In a monumental 1603 version of the story painted by the great Dutch Mannerist Hendrik Goltzius -- a masterpiece already in LACMA’s collection -- the shocking theme is mercenary love. Danae, a sumptuous nude asleep on a pillow of platinum-colored satin amid a flurry of impish cherubs, is attended by a grizzled crone acting as procurer for the impatient Jupiter; leering Mercury, Roman god of commerce, looks on with glee. Greed and power are about to soil purity.

Klimt also painted the myth, in an explicitly sexual work still in a private Austrian collection. But Adele, his metaphoric Danae, is a thoroughly modern Jewish woman of taste, style, brains and means. The artist showers her in a torrent of gold, the light enveloping her body and ready to re-conceive the world.

“Adele I” was painted in 1907 -- the same year a painter of wholly different temperament arrived in Vienna in search of his future. The young Adolf Hitler tried but failed to gain acceptance into the local art academy, so he went on to attempt to remake the world in another, more unfathomable and brutal way than Klimt.

It was also the year that an as-yet-unknown Picasso, 19 years Klimt’s junior and working in Paris, painted “Les Demoiselles.” The revolutionary Cubist picture is now universally regarded as the opening salvo of 20th century art.

The Picasso and the Klimt, although stylistically different, are startlingly similar in formal and conceptual terms, even though neither knew of the other’s existence. A Western European perspective informs Picasso’s wild invention, while a Central and Eastern European one drives Klimt’s carnal decoration.

Both large canvases are roughly square. The shape, unlike the more common rectangular canvas, creates a physical field of abstract equilibrium. Erased is the association with landscape, which is horizontal, or with figures, which are vertical. Conventions of European painting are dismissed at the fundamental level of canvas and stretcher bars. The artists mean to start over, in league with a new century.

Both are images of female eroticism, but both are frankly outrageous in their deviation from the norm. They’re stripped of artistic trappings used since the Renaissance. In their place, archaic styles are revived and forms are borrowed from foreign cultures.

For Picasso that meant African motifs, ancient Iberian sculpture and Egyptian art. For Klimt it meant much the same -- especially Egyptian. A pattern of “god’s eyes” and pseudo-hieroglyphs adorns Adele’s garment. Whorls, zigzags, spirals and other decorative geometric patterns derive from Minoan and Mycenaean art of the Bronze Age.

Byzantine mosaics and medieval Sienese paintings of the Madonna are other pre-Renaissance models, their gold grounds meant to shimmer in candlelight to enhance the mysticism. Klimt’s gold is soft, gentle and atmospheric, not hard or glittery. It reveals an intimate affinity with mottled screen-paintings of Edo-period Japan. LACMA’s Shinen’kan Collection -- the most important repository of Edo screen-paintings outside Asia -- includes dozens of remarkable gold-ground examples.

Adele, seated in an overstuffed armchair with head and torso framed by a hallucinatory halo of golden patterns, is like the spirit of a sensuous river flowing through a field, implied by a luscious patch of apple green at the lower left. She’s not only pagan Danae, she’s a modern Eve -- and Klimt is her Adam, art their god.

The chaste backdrop to “Adele II,” by contrast, is a colorful Oriental screen depicting warriors. The 1912 standing portrait was painted after the long affair had ended. Rapture has been replaced by respect.

Adele’s golden aureole has gone black, transformed into the wide-brimmed hat of a handsome Viennese society matron. Her body, framed in a stole, remains an undulating river, but now it courses through fields of floral carpet.

In the Post-Impressionist wooded landscape from 1903, nature meshes with a grid pattern to conflate organic and mathematical structures. This formal balance between body and mind anticipates paintings like Agnes Martin’s 1981 abstraction in LACMA’s contemporary galleries. “Apple Tree I” from 1911-12 inserts another secular reference to Eden, where experiencing art equals partaking of the tree of knowledge.

Finally the 1916 landscape, perhaps unfinished, divides the leafy, rolling hillside view of summer houses into nearly exact quadrants, as if you’re looking through a window pane. The rigor of Cezanne at Mont Ste.-Victoire melds with the ravishing power of organic decoration.

The show is exceptional for the breadth and quality of the ensemble. The paintings, virtually unaccompanied by didactic labels, occupy one room, where their intrinsic power is enhanced by their contextual relationship to each other. An anteroom includes all the supporting information one might need.

Curator Stephanie Barron, who has made LACMA the go-to museum for probing exhibitions of early 20th century European art made outside the hub of Paris, and her team capped a 25-year record of achievement with this unexpected coup. (Information is at www.lacma.org.) But what are the chances for such a presentation to continue at LACMA in perpetuity?

Published estimates placing the paintings’ value at up to $300 million are surely inflated. Still, when a mediocre Picasso holds the record auction price of $104 million, we are up at nose-bleed altitudes. It won’t be easy.

But certainly it is within reach. An acquisition would most likely require a consortium of donors, probably extending payments (and tax benefits) over time. Perhaps the Getty Trust could also figure out a way to help.

Looking at “Adele I,” I couldn’t avoid remembering the rare 14th century Duccio Madonna that the Getty reportedly declined in 2004 as “too expensive” and that New York’s Metropolitan Museum promptly snapped up. It came from the great collection of Adolphe Stoclet (1871-1949), whose famous 1905 house in Brussels was designed by Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann; he also commissioned a brilliant group of dining room murals from Klimt. Stoclet, like the Bloch-Bauers, was among the artist’s great patrons. He didn’t buy the Duccio until 1923, but it was the finest in his collection of medieval gold-ground panels that helped inspire “Adele I.”

When the Getty demurred, the Met swooped in -- and now there are no more Duccio panels left in private hands. Opportunities missed are lost forever. The magnitude of the opportunity presented by the Klimt ensemble, for LACMA and Los Angeles, cannot be overstated.

Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.