County Art Collectors Make Top 100 List
Irvine Co. chairman Donald Bren and Etsuko and Joe Price of Newport Beach are among the 100 top private collectors in the United States as listed in Art & Antiques magazine’s March issue.
“The few fellow collectors who’ve seen . . . Bren’s relatively small and carefully chosen collection . . . praise its rigor and intellectual purity,” the article says.
The collection concentrates on postwar Abstract Expressionism, with work by Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, but Bren has recently begun collecting contemporary California artists like Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud and Billy Al Bengston. Bren is a trustee of both the Newport Harbor Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Joe Price, a retired developer who donated $5 million to build the Pavilion for Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum (which opened last September), collects paintings from Japan’s Edo period.
The article quotes an unnamed L.A. County Museum curator who said these works are “the best outside the royal household in Tokyo.”
“I can’t read the seals or signatures” on the paintings, Joe Price is quoted in the story, “so I have to choose with my eye. I buy what I love . . .”
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