A TEMPORARY EXHIBIT COUNT PANZA’S WORKS

All 80 works acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art from Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo will be exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary from Feb. 13 to Sept. 29.

The Abstract Expressionist and Pop works, not previously shown together, will constitute the foundation of MOCA’s permanent collection.

According to MOCA Director Richard Koshalek: “They were collected by Panza between 1956 and 1963 and make a significant statement about American and European art of the mid-’40s through the mid-’60s. Panza purchased many of these works shortly after they were made during what he considered a pivotal period in each artist’s career. As a whole, the works reflect a concentration and careful selection of works by a number of artists, rather than an encyclopedic survey of the period.”

The Panza collection at MOCA consists of 12 black-and-white paintings and one in color by Franz Kline, 1953-1961; seven paintings by Mark Rothko, 1954-1960; 11 “combines” by Robert Rauschenberg, such as “Interview,” “Coca Cola Plan” and “Factum I”; 16 works by Claes Oldenburg, acquired in 1961 by Panza from “The Store,” a storefront installation by the artist; eight early-’60s works by James Rosenquist using emblematic American objects in formal explorations of scale, selectivity and abstraction; four Roy Lichtenstein paintings, all from 1962, and two sculptures by George Segal, “Man in Armchair” and “Sunbathers on the Rooftop,” from the mid-to-late ‘60s.

In addition to these American works are six paintings by French artist Jean Fautrier and 14 paintings by Spaniard Antoni Tapies.

The exhibition was organized by senior curator Julia Brown with assistant curator Kerry Brougher. The catalogue, designed by Massimo Vignelli and edited by Brown, has an introduction by Koshalek and an interview with Panza by Brougher.

Opening concurrently at MOCA are two other exhibitions: “Allen Ruppersberg: The Secret of Life and Death,” a survey of 60 pieces from 1969 to 1984, and “Mark Lere: New and Selected Work,” featuring about 40 recent and newly commissioned works by the Los Angeles sculptor. The Ruppersberg and Lere shows both run through May 26.

Adolf Hitler’s wish to amass the world’s largest collection of classical and traditional art is documented in “The Great Art Dictator,” airing today on KCET Channel 28 at 6 p.m.

The BBC-produced documentary was written and produced by historian Norman Stone. He traces a story of plunder, dubious purchases and thefts committed in the process of amassing a trove of artworks that were to be housed in a vast museum named the Fuehrermuseum, to be built in Hitler’s hometown of Linz, Austria.

Much of this art was stolen from Jewish families; all of it ended up stored in salt mines near Vienna, hidden to avoid damage by Allied bombing.

Stone, a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a specialist in German history, visits the locations where the story unfolded in Munich, Vienna, Florence and Paris. He interviews Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, who talks about construction of the Fuehrermuseum; Madeline Duke, whose family’s paintings were looted in prewar Vienna; Professor Hans Herbst, agent and procurer for the art treasures of Linz, and Thomas Carr-Howe, one of the first Allied officers to “liberate” the Linz treasures.

Two new exhibitions open Tuesday at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park: “Old Master Drawings From the Feitelson Collection” and “Connie Zehr: Flash Back: 1969-1985, an Installation of Mnemonic Fragments.”

The Feitelson collection show contains 73 drawings by 68 European and Italian artists of the 16th to the 19th centuries. Among them are Giambattista Tiepolo, Gian Domenico Tiepolo, Anthony Van Dyck, Tadeo Zuccaro, Palma Giovane, Luca Cambiaso and Annibale Carracci. The late Lorser Feitelson and his wife Helen Lundeberg Feitelson (both seminal figures in the history of contemporary Los Angeles art) shared a lifetime passion for drawing. Among their acquisitions, gathered over many decades, is a large collection of post-Renaissance drawings, some of which were selected for this exhibition by Prof. Alfred Moir, UC Santa Barbara, in cooperation with David Farmer, director of UCSB’s University Art Gallery, where both the exhibition and its catalogue originated.

Connie Zehr has been creating meditative and sensuous sand installations for almost 20 years. She has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, among other galleries and museums throughout the country. But because of the ephemeral nature of such art, her work is relatively little known.

This exhibition includes one new installation, fragments of past installations, photographs, drawings, objects and a slide presentation. A catalogue with text by artist/critic Fidel Danieli accompanies the exhibition.

Both shows end Feb. 24.

The fourth in a continuing series of small exhibitions of Old Master drawings selected from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection is being shown in Gallery 224 through mid-March.

On view are Italian drawings from the 15th through the 17th centuries, featuring the work of Raphael, Pontormo, Carracci and Andrea Mantegna, whose pen-and-brown-ink drawing of “Four Saints” was made as a preparatory study for the San Zeno altarpiece in a church in Verona.

The Getty drawing collection, established in 1981, contains about 85 works from the late 15th Century to the end of the 19th Century.