Irvine Museum Paints Early California’s Portrait

After making headlines with her multimillion-dollar art-buying spree last year, real-estate heiress Joan Irvine Smith on Wednesday gave a sneak preview of the Irvine Museum she has established to exhibit the bucolic California Impressionist paintings that remind her of the undeveloped Orange County of her youth.

“I can see (in the paintings) a California as we will never see it again--California as it was when I was a child,” said Smith.

The 4,000-square-foot private, nonprofit museum, on the 12th floor of an office tower here at 18881 Von Karman Ave., opens to the public on Friday. Allowing for the exhibition of some 60 paintings at a time, tops, it will serve as a temporary site for five or six years until a larger, permanent museum is built in Irvine, officials said.

Smith, an arts patron and the great-granddaughter of James Irvine, who established the giant Irvine Co. real estate and development firm, received a quarter-billion dollars from the 1991 sale of stock in the company. That fall, she began voraciously snatching up California Impressionists paintings.

Smith said Wednesday she has amassed about 2,000 works but would not say how much she has spent. Various figures have been bandied about; one art expert who wished to remain anonymous said her outlay was well over $15 million. In the spring, she also plans to open a commercial gallery of California Impressionism and contemporary art.

The Irvine Museum, dedicated to the preservation and display of historical California Impressionism, will focus on works by plein-air painters, active between 1890 and 1930. Most depicted the Southland’s pristine landscape, emulating the French Impressionists and their adulation of natural light.

Some California Impressionists formed an art colony in Laguna Beach, near the sprawling Irvine Ranch owned by Smith’s grandfather, James Irvine II. The ranch, part of which was developed into the city of Irvine, once covered more than 100,000 acres. The Irvine Co. remains Orange County’s largest private landholder.

“I learned to walk on this beach over here,” she said Wednesday, pointing to an F.W. Cuprien seascape titled “Evening’s Iridescence.” “I used to dive off the end of that point. I climbed all over those rocks.”

The museum also will play a principal role in research, officials said. That role figures to expand at the permanent site, which is to include a research library, auditorium and conservation center. Although Smith said she was instrumental in the development of the Irvine Ranch (“development was inevitable”), she also envisions the museum as something of a monument to environmentalism.

The paintings “stand in silent testament to our regard for the environment, and their elegant account must not go unheeded,” she wrote in a statement. On Wednesday, she added, “I’m hoping the museum is a catalyst to get the development community and environmental entities together to see if maybe they can work together down the line.”

At present, the museum’s permanent collection consists of some 65 paintings, but that figure will grow, officials said. All but one have been donated or paid for by Smith or her mother, Athalie R. Clarke, who also sits on the museum’s seven-member board.

The inaugural exhibit consists of more than 50 works from the permanent collection by Guy Rose, William Wendt, Granville Redmond, Edgar Payne and others. Eventually, works on loan from other museums and elsewhere will be shown.

Smith denied that the museum’s focus is too narrow. “I like it, and if I like it, that’s the direction I’m going to go in. I think it tells a history of California that’s invaluable,” she said.

A story in the October ’92 issue of Forbes magazine described Smith’s plans for the museum and commercial gallery as part of a “strategy to promote” works she believes are “underrated by scholars and undervalued by collectors.”

Forbes wrote that she has paid “some unheard-of prices” to build her inventory--such as $200,000 for a Redmond and twice that for a Rose--and that her critics claim her “whole scheme” has “artificially inflated prices of second-rate paintings.”

On Wednesday, however, Smith said, “These paintings to me are equally as good as many of your French Impressionists . . . (and) they are of subject matter I (grew) up with. This is what has drawn me to the art.”

Whether such art really is “second rate,” as Forbes labeled it, “depends on who you talk to,” said Ilene Susan Fort, associate curator of American art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“Years ago, unless a piece of art was created in New York or close to it, it didn’t count,” Fort said. “In the last 10 years, colleagues of mine have been researching and publishing” studies about regional art from all around the country, she said.

As for whether Smith’s purchases inflated--artificially or otherwise--the price of California Impressionism, Fort said, “The going rate was zooming up before she came on the market; I think she just encouraged it further. She came in at a time when American art was doing extremely well, then the (recession) hit the American art market. . . . She came in at the tail end of that and kept it going.”

Additionally, it takes more than one collector to inflate a market, said Whitney Ganz, director of William A. Karges Fine Art, Santa Monica, from whom Smith has bought “quite a number” of paintings. Ganz said the average price of his California Impressionist paintings is about $15,000, but works can go as high as $225,000. Smith, he said, has made some “very, very advantageous buys” from him.

“I don’t believe she has ulterior motives,” Ganz said. “The lady doesn’t need to make any more money.”

Besides, Smith doesn’t need to hike prices to maintain the equity in her paintings, he said. “Unlike contemporary art, for instance, these paintings have had a track record of 50, 75, maybe 100 years of being bought and sold, so that equity is always there, she doesn’t have to protect it.”

Ray Redfern, owner of a Laguna Beach gallery bearing his name who has sold Smith several works, said simply that she is “doing it for a passion.”

“She’s a fairly intelligent woman and did pay some premium prices to break lose some paintings that had been in (private or museum) collections for 15 or 20 years, but in any market you have to do that. She’s pretty astute in her buying,” Redfern said.

Smith conceded that she wants to bring California Impressionism to the public and that she believes the work is underrated. With a few exceptions--she paid a lot for a Rose, though won’t say how much--she has not paid extremely high prices. And as one who is still buying, she said she has not seen prices shoot up.

“You’re not going to see the value of these paintings increase for a number of years,” she said. “It’s a slow, slow process.

LACMA’s Fort believes that the Irvine Museum “has a lot of potential” and applauded Smith’s acquisition of works made after the plein-air period. But she cautioned that “if (Smith) wants to contribute to the culture and art of California, she has to go beyond” a concentration on plein-air.

Smith said that while the museum will focus on plein-air paintings, its collection includes a few pieces by such scene painters as Millard Sheets and Thomas Craig, who were active in the 1930s and ‘40s.

Serving as museum curator is Janet Blake Dominik, who has curated exhibitions at the Laguna Art Museum as well as corporate and private collections. Its director is Jean Stern, a lecturer, former art history instructor and former director of the now-defunct Petersen Galleries in Beverly Hills and brother of Los Angeles art dealers Louis and George Stern, both of whom sold Smith paintings.

Charles Desmarais, director of the Laguna Art Museum, which focuses on California art, said he foresees no conflict between the two museums’ missions. The permanent collection of the Laguna museum, which received a $100,000 grant in 1991 and other support from Smith and her mother, includes about 150 plein-air paintings.

“More attention to the art of California will generate even more interest among the public and in the field, and that’s really good for everybody,” Desmarais said.

Smith said she has given more than $3 million in cash and paintings to the Irvine Museum but has not established an operating, acquisitions or donations budget for the future. She said she plans to solicit the private sector for money to run the museum and to help her acquire land for and build a permanent museum.

Early plans to build the museum on the UC Irvine campus and lease the land from the university were put on hold while Smith established the temporary site, officials said. Smith said she does not know when efforts to establish a permanent museum will begin, or where it will be, other than somewhere in Irvine.

“I wanted to be able to do this for the area,” she said. Irvine has “the Irvine Barclay Theatre and the university, but they don’t have an art museum.”

The museum will be open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.