ART MUSEUM THINKS BIG FOR NEW SEASON

Boasting of a high international profile and brandishing statistics that attribute a major attendance gain by all local museums to its blockbuster “Precious Legacy” exhibition of last fall, the San Diego Museum of Art on Wednesday announced an ambitious exhibition lineup for 1985-86.

“We are competing on an international scale for major exhibits,” said Steven L. Brezzo, director of the Balboa Park institution. “Many of the ones we’ve scheduled for 1985-86 are traveling to three or fewer museums. The reason we are among those is that we’ve demonstrated that we have the staff and the audience responsiveness to do justice to these displays. We compete as eagerly for them as our city competed for (the right to host the 1988) Super Bowl.”

The museum’s deputy director, Jane G. Rice, summarized findings of a survey of out-of-town visitors to the “Precious Legacy” exhibition of Nazi-confiscated Jewish artifacts from the Czechoslovak State Collections. Conducted by CIC Research Inc., the survey showed that the “total direct, indirect and induced effects” of the exhibition amounted to $12.7 million in San Diego sales and $120,000 in transient occupancy and sales tax revenues.

The survey also revealed that nearly 65% of of those viewing “Precious Legacy” were from outside San Diego County. Rice cited tourism reports that attribute a 27% increase in local museum attendance in September and a 58% percent increase in October to the exhibition.

The museum’s ‘85-86 exhibition series begins April 27 with “Siqueiros,” a display of 55 works by one of Mexico’s most important painters and muralists, David Siqueiros, that runs until June 9. The display, which will make its only U.S. stop at the San Diego museum after touring the Soviet Union, includes reproductions of the artist’s large public murals.

From June 29 to Aug. 11, the museum will present “Fortissiimo! Thirty Years from the Richard Brown Baker Collection,” featuring 166 post-World War II paintings and sculptures from Baker’s collection of American and European avant-garde works.

“Master Drawings by Gericault,” to run from Aug. 24 to Oct. 20, travels only to San Diego and Houston after its premiere at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. It features drawings and watercolors that illuminate Gericault’s reputation as the central figure in 19th-Century French Romanticism. The exhibit marks the first showing of preparatory drawings for the artist’s masterpiece, “The Raft of the Medusa.”

From Aug. 31 to Oct. 13, “Dutch and Flemish Masters: Paintings from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts” will mark the first U.S. tour of 17th- and 18th-Century masterworks by Rubens, Van Dyck and others. “A Celebration: Modern American Painting, 1915,” running from Oct. 5 to Nov. 24, re-creates the “modern art” exhibition held during the Pan-American Exposition of 1915 in Balboa Park, an exhibition that helped popularize the works of the “Ash Can School” of painting led by Joan Sloan.

From Nov. 16 to Jan. 12, 1986, the exclusive West Coast appearance of “American Masters: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection” will feature 113 paintings owned by Swiss Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. The display features examples of every major American art movement from the 18th Century to the 20th Century, from colonial masterworks to photo-realism.

“The Graphic Art of Toulouse-Lautrec,” to run from Feb. 1 to April 13, 1986, will be the first showing in five years of the San Diego museum’s Baldwin Collection of about 100 Lautrec lithographs.

“Chinese Export Silver: A Legacy of Luxury,” to run from Feb. 8, 1986, to March 23, 1986, will commemorate the Bicentennial of the American China Trade with more than 70 silver objects created by Chinese silversmiths between the 18th and 20th centuries. The major exhibition series ends with the April 5-May 18, 1986, West Coast premiere of “Photographers of the Weimar Republic,” featuring 125 photographs chronicling the pivotal years of 1919 to 1933 in Germany.