NEWPORT MUSEUM TO GET $1 MILLION FOR EXHIBITS

Newport Harbor Art Museum will receive $1 million over the next 10 years from the Irvine Co. for a series of major annual exhibits, it was announced Tuesday.

The gift from the giant Orange County landowner and developer was announced in conjunction with the opening of a retrospective of the works of contemporary realist Wayne Thiebaud. The Thiebaud exhibit, sponsored by a previously announced $100,000 gift from the Irvine Co., is the first of a series of 10 exhibits the company’s pledge will underwrite at the museum through 1994.

“A strong and vital museum is a critical part of the cultural and educational development of the city of Newport Beach, and we’re happy to help fulfill the museum’s commitment to the cultural life of all of Orange County,” Irvine Co. President Thomas H. Nielsen said in a prepared statement. The Irvine Co. owns the Newport Center business and shopping complex in which the museum is situated.

The gift “is one of the most significant corporate gifts to a museum in the nation,” said Ray H. Johnson, president of the museum’s board of trustees, in the same statement. In 1984, the Irvine Co. also donated $100,000 to sponsor the museum’s Olympic Arts Festival exhibits.

Museum director Kevin Consey told The Times on Tuesday that there are plans to mount an exhibit entitled “Surrealism Into Abstraction” in the late summer of 1986. “The exhibit will feature works by American and European painters of the ‘40s and ‘50s, including major pieces by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, (Mark) Rothko, (Adolph) Gottlieb, (Joan) Miro and will travel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum in New York. It is still unconfirmed, but that is the quality and scale of exhibits we are talking about. Beyond that, nothing is set,” Consey said.