Joan Irvine Smith to Open Temporary Museum of Art

Real-estate heiress Joan Irvine Smith, who was possibly the year’s biggest buyer of Southern California Impressionist paintings in the country, will open a temporary museum in an office tower here on Jan. 15 to exhibit the works she owns and others, a museum official said Wednesday.

The Irvine Museum, to be located at 18881 Von Karman Ave. on the 12th floor, will operate at the 4,000-square-foot temporary site for “the next five or six years, however long it takes to build a permanent structure,” museum executive director Jean Stern said.

Smith, granddaughter of the man who established the mammoth Irvine Co. real estate and development firm, announced plans in April to open a museum in Irvine for her new, burgeoning collection of scenic paintings that depict the Southland’s bucolic past. Experts estimate she has spent several million dollars on acquisitions.

The temporary site will allow the exhibition of 50 to 60 paintings, and will house the museum’s administrative offices, Stern said. It will tentatively be open to the public--free of charge--from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, he said. Plans call for paintings on loan from other museums to eventually be shown there as well as those in the museum’s collection.

Smith said in April she hoped to build a permanent museum on the UC Irvine campus and lease the land from the university. But museum officials have “put aside” efforts to further develop those plans, focusing instead on opening the temporary site, Stern said.

“We wanted a functioning museum” as soon as possible, he said, expressing no doubt that it will attract visitors.

“We’ll be validating the first hour of parking, and it’s a beautiful building with beautiful paintings,” he said.

Operations at the new museum will be funded by the Irvine Museum Foundation, a nonprofit corporation headed by Smith, Stern said.

In March, the museum will send a traveling exhibit of 55 works from its collection to the Fleischer Museum in Scottsdale, Ariz., which will be shown here next summer and at the Oakland Museum in Northern California in the fall, Stern said.