ART REVIEW : NEW GALLERY PUTS ART IN FOCUS WITH ANTIQUES

A new player has moved into Laguna Beach’s contemporary-oriented gallery scene with an opening exhibit that features two hallowed names from the past--Rembrandt and Renoir.

In a novel twist on the traditional commercial art gallery, Trey Ligon Gallery offers period antiques with its art.

In the current show, 30 prints made from original etchings by 17th-Century Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn and eight bronzes by famed French impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir are displayed alongside furniture and other antiques from the 14th through 17th centuries.

The price tags on the antiques and furniture range from about $900 to $55,000, gallery director Trey Ligon said. Among the antiques on display are 17th-Century delftware from Rembrandt’s native country, 14th- and 15th-Century English Gothic furniture and an elaborate 15th-Century Austrian snow sleigh shaped like a horse.

Another antique, which Ligon described as a “museum piece,” is a 15th-Century wooden triptych altarpiece taken from Cologne Cathedral shortly before the Allied bombing of the German city in World War II. The altarpiece may be worth as much as $275,000, he said.

The combined gallery and antique shop is the brainchild of antique dealer Richard Yeakel, who remodeled one of his four Laguna Beach antique shops to create the new commercial space for the Ligon gallery.

Ligon believes the idea of combining fine art and antiques in a commercial setting will catch on. One advantage to the arrangement, he said in an interview, is that decorators can view the vintage furniture and art together.

“What I’m trying to do is set the trend,” said Ligon, who at 23 has already worked as an art dealer for five years. “In 10 years, every art dealer will sell furniture.” Ligon will also be in charge of exhibits for a second combined art gallery-antique shop, to be opened by Yeakel in New York City in September.

Ligon, a Laguna Beach resident, claimed that his is the only Orange County gallery to sell old master prints, although a few Los Angeles commercial galleries deal in such works.

The 30 Rembrandt prints on display at Trey Ligon Gallery, priced between $3,000 and $20,000, are from the collection of Beverly Hills art dealer Michael Schwartz. Todd Bingham, an independent art consultant who often works for Schwartz, called him “the largest source dealer of Rembrandt prints in the country.”

A surge in interest in old master prints has led Schwartz to experiment in the last few years with exhibiting and selling prints through galleries other than his own Gallery Michael in Beverly Hills and Century City. “We’ve done it all over the world,” though never before in Orange County, Bingham said.

Rembrandt made about 300 etchings, and impressions were made from his original plates through the 19th Century. Prints are no longer being produced, and most of the actual plates are now in museums and private collections.

Because most prints are not dated, Bingham said, it is impossible to determine an exact date of impression, but a study of the paper and ink used can usually narrow the time of a print’s origin to a window of 40 to 50 years. The prints on display in Laguna Beach were pulled in the 17th through 19th centuries and include examples of Rembrandt’s religious scenes, peasant scenes and portraits, including some examples of his famous self-portraits.

The eight Renoir bronzes were commissioned in 1983 by the artist’s estate, which had won a lengthy court battle with a foundry over rights to the original molds. After 12 casts of each sculpture were produced, the molds were retired to a museum.

Art exhibits in the gallery will change about every three months, Ligon said. Under consideration for future exhibits are works by the plein-air painters of the 18th and 19th centuries, a show of tapestries and an exhibit of Judaica.