Now Playing at LACMA: The French Collection : Los Angeles-based Francophiles have loaned some of their finest pieces to the county museum for ‘Monet to Matisse,’ defining in the process the regional taste in Gallic art

In the early years of this century, it was a tradition during the summer months for museums in cities such as New York and Boston to exhibit art from the private collections of residents on summer holiday. Relationships were forged between museums and collectors, but the prime beneficiary of this alliance was the public, treated to great works ordinarily reserved for the eyes of affluent art patrons, their families and friends.

Harking back to that august tradition, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has organized for our summer enjoyment “Monet to Matisse: French Art in Southern California Collections,” an exhibition opening today of paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings from private collections. More than 130 works by such artists as Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Degas, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Leger, Braque, Picasso, Matisse and others are on display, gathered from more than 60 local art collectors. Nevertheless, the show represents only a small percentage of French art in Southern California.

At 1 p.m. today at LACMA, Richard R. Brettell, director of the Dallas Museum of Art, will deliver a lecture on French art from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries.

About two years ago, Philip Conisbee and Judi Freeman, curators of the exhibition, attended a Dallas Museum show of Impressionists and modern masters borrowed from private collections in Dallas.

“Both of us came away from that show thinking how remarkable it was that there was so much high-quality art from that period in Dallas,” Freeman said. Rick Brettell “found a real, unspoken civic pride in that show. We thought we could do something very similar here.”

Twelve of Pissarro’s paintings, etchings and watercolors are included in the show. Eight canvases by Monet and seven works by Degas are on view. In contrast, there is a paucity of Dadaism and Surrealism in Southern California collections. “We have some examples, but not very many,” Freeman said.

“We can’t be representative of what went on in France because not everything is here,” Conisbee said. “The show has its own sort of flavor for that reason, and an interesting feature of it is that it does reflect local taste. Nearly everyone we approached was willing to lend to the exhibition, which I think shows extraordinary faith in the museum and a desire to share what they have with the Los Angeles public.”

What local collectors have is gemlike collections. The Lucille Ellis Simon family collection, begun in the 1950s by Norton Simon, consists of “exclusively French art and a very substantial collection of painting, sculpture and watercolors,” Conisbee said.

“More recently, Nathan and Marion Smooke have formed an outstanding collection of late-19th-Century and early-20th-Century French and German art,” he said. “And the Cantors, who are well-known for their Rodin collection, are buying serious objects in French painting,” he said, referring to B. Gerald (Bernie) and Iris Cantor.

Fran and film producer Ray Stark, “also known primarily for their sculpture collection, have a superb painting collection that we’ve borrowed from. The cover of the catalogue, Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’ (1919), is one of theirs,” Freeman added.

Other lenders from the entertainment industry include Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Price and Elizabeth Taylor, whose father was an art dealer in Los Angeles in the 1940s. “He had connections with established art dealers in Europe, and was responsible for bringing a good amount of work that became part of Hollywood-based collections,” Freeman said.

In the 1930s and 1940s, most collectors of French art in the area were in the movie industry. Edward G. Robinson, Charles Laughton, Marion Davies, Ernst Lubitsch and Michael Todd all collected French art during those years.

Today, collectors come from various backgrounds and professions reflecting the economic diversity of the region. More significant than their occupations is their passion for the art.

“Art is much more than what you see,” said Mickey Gribin, who with his wife, Ruth, began collecting early-20th-Century art during the late 1950s.

The paintings the Gribins loaned are by artists who are not household names: abstract painters Frantisek Kupka and Auguste Herbin, Cubist Jean Metzinger and decorative Cubist Leopold Survage. “In the 20th Century we have the names Matisse, Picasso, Leger, but there are also less well known figures who were equally important for a briefer period,” Freeman said.

“It has been a rule from the very beginning that any time an educational institution wants to borrow a work, we’ll loan it,” Mickey Gribin said.

His aunt had a collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in Los Angeles that literally lined the walls. Seeing her collection for the first time when they moved here in 1945, the Gribins were inspired. But, said Mickey Gribin, “we did not respond to that type of art.

“It all began with the sentence in a book, ‘An artist can paint what he knows exists, not necessarily only what he sees.’ That led us to abstract artists. When I’d read about Kandinsky and Mondrian, suddenly there would be Kupka’s name. The more I saw his name, the more I wanted to know about his work. There wasn’t much reproduced anywhere. On a trip to New York in the late 1960s, I saw a painting at the Guggenheim that really knocked me over.”

The Gribins’ first Cubist work in the collection, Andre Lhote’s “Woman With Striped Apron” (1917), was purchased by mail. “I started writing dealers in Paris, giving them a list of things we could afford, the name of the artists whose work we were interested in and the year we wanted,” Mickey Gribin explained. “Some responded by sending slides. We bought a projector and projected them on the wall to the exact size of the image.” Calling the Lhote “a beautiful little painting,” he said it was still hanging in the couple’s home.

The Cantors loaned two works to the show because, Iris Cantor said, “we want to share these paintings that we love with the community.” One of these, “The Portrait of Dr. Martinez in the Artist’s Studio” (1878), an oil on canvas by Armand Guillaumin, “is rare for Guillaumin because he usually painted landscapes,” she said.

The other, “Nude Reclining on a Divan” (1873), a stunning pastel by Gustave Caillebotte purchased by the Cantors in 1990, had been missing for many years. “Sotheby’s was called to an apartment in New York to look at several works to be sold,” Iris Cantor said. “Using a flashlight in a dark room, the man from Sotheby’s saw a label and looked at this pastel and nearly fell over, because he couldn’t believe what he saw. We saw it in an auction catalogue, went to see it and loved it. There was one other person who obviously picked up on it like we did, because he was bidding against us. But we wanted it, so we got it.”

Bernie Cantor, the founder of Cantor Fitzgerald Inc., a financial holding company, became an art collector because he had an hour to kill before an appointment in New York City in 1945.

He explained: “I went into the Metropolitan Museum and there, lo and behold, I ran into Rodin’s ‘Hand of God’ in marble. It’s a giant hand with a rock coming out of it, and a man and a woman coming out of this rock. It gave me sort of a religious experience. I went to my appointment and I didn’t think about it again until I ran into a small ‘Hand of God’ at a gallery on Madison Avenue. The dealer explained to me that Rodin had made them in three different sizes. So I wound up with the small ‘Hand of God’ for $95. That was in 1947. I want you to know that I still have it in my house.”

Over the last 44 years, Bernie Cantor has acquired about 700 of Rodin’s works, 400 of which have been donated to institutions around the world. His gift of 155 sculptures to Stanford University has made it the second-largest repository of works by Rodin in the world, after the Musee Rodin in Paris. The Cantors have also given 49 Rodin sculptures to LACMA, and millions of dollars and works of art to numerous museums and universities.

The first significant Los Angeles collector to focus on French art, William Preston Harrison, also believed in shopping for the public. On a trip to Europe in 1926, the Harrisons studied contemporary art under Lhote, who assisted them in acquiring numerous paintings. When they returned to Los Angeles, they donated 46 paintings to the art division of the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art--which had opened in 1913 in Exposition Park--to be housed in a gallery designated as the Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Gallery of Modern French Art.

That collection remains at LACMA today. However, other notable French art collections slipped away from Los Angeles with little or no resistance. Walter and Louise Arensberg moved to Hollywood from New York in 1921, bringing with them a renowned collection of 20th-Century avant-garde art. It eventually included more than 200 works by artists such as Brancusi, Duchamp, Leger, Matisse and Picasso. The Arensbergs offered their collection to the Los Angeles County Museum in 1938, but the museum did not share their avant-garde tastes and showed no interest. The collection finally found a home at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the 1950s.

Edward G. Robinson amassed a magnificent collection of Impressionist and early modern paintings that was ultimately sold as part of a divorce settlement in 1955. Monet’s “Snow Effect at Falaise,” one of the few works from the Robinson collection remaining in Los Angeles, is in the current exhibition.

Conisbee, who curated French painting at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before he came here just over two years ago, said that organizing “Monet to Matisse” has been an opportunity for him to meet the local collecting community and find out what is here. “What we are trying to do with this exhibition is make a bridge to the collecting community, to get people to call on us, and for us to be able to call on them,” he said.

Freeman and Conisbee emphasized that the exhibition should not be seen as a definitive statement on French art in Los Angeles, but as a starting point for future projects and relationships with collectors. “We would be happy to know about more that is out there,” Freeman said. “I hope I get a jillion phone calls from people who say, ‘Why didn’t you come and see me?’ Because then I’ll be looking at collections all summer.”

“Monet to Matisse: French Art in Southern California Collections” opens today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. The exhibit continues through Aug. 11. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Admission: $5 adults, $3.50 students and seniors and $1 children 6 through 17. Information: (213) 857-6000.