NEWPORT HARBOR MUSEUM RECEIVES BIG ART DONATION

The Newport Harbor Art Museum has received the largest corporate donation of art in its officials’ memory, 38 contemporary artworks from San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Bank, including pieces by such well-known artists as Elmer Bishoff and Joseph Albers.

The museum is one of six in California to share 172 works given by the bank; their estimated total value is $1 million. Newport Harbor director Kevin Consey said the acquisition is worth $250,000 to $500,000.

“We were able to make some choices among the works,” museum director Kevin Consey added, “and our emphasis was contemporary California and contemporary American.”

Among pieces he said the museum was particularly happy to receive was an untitled 1981 work, acrylic on canvas, by Berkeley artist Bishoff. “The Bishoff is significant because it’s an important work by an artist who forms a crucial link in understanding post-war California art,” Consey said, noting that until now the museum had just one Bishoff in its permanent collection of 1,900 pieces.

Consey also said a series of 11 Frank Stella lithographs is an important acquisition.

Wells Fargo got a collection that included pieces by Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell when the bank acquired Crocker Bank in 1986, Wells Fargo officials said.

“The reason we’re giving much of this artwork away,” spokesman Bob Pacini said, “is that a good deal of it is contemporary type of art and Wells Fargo would of course stress Western type of art. This art does not figure into our Western corporate image, and we are giving it away. We are keeping roughly 35 pieces from the Crocker collection.”

Consey said the Crocker collection had been “fairly young” when Wells Fargo acquired it. “They had only started it three years before Wells Fargo took them over.”

Several former Crocker officials and current Wells Fargo executives affiliated with the Newport Harbor helped get the museum a share of the collection, Consey said. “We began meeting about this in March or April of last year and made a selection in May or June, and it was consummated in August.”

The donation includes nine works by Albers, three by Charles Christopher Hill, the Stellas, the Bishoff and others by Ed Moses, Charles Gaines and Larry Bell.

While the museum’s permanent collection resides most of the time in a large locked room at one end of the museum’s low building on San Clemente Drive, it forms an essential part of the institution’s identity. Museums circulate and exchange art for exhibitions, and the permanent collection determines how much leverage one has in trying to bargain with others for art loans.

The museum does use parts of the permanent collection for its own shows. This summer, for example, the Newport Harbor mounted a permanent collection show called “Highlights of California Art Since 1945: A Collecting Partnership,” composed of 21 pieces owned by local collectors associated with the museum and 50 pieces from the Newport’s holdings.