Happy Blend of Two Pleasures: Art, Food

Lovers of abstract art and gourmet food were in their element Thursday night when the Newport Harbor Art Museum held a Founders Preview of “American Abstraction From the Addison Gallery of American Art.”

About 130 guests gathered at the Newport Beach museum for an after-hours reception staged by Cartier and museum trustees to ponder the abstract art, sip champagne and sample exotic hors d’oeuvres from the kitchen of Patina restaurant in Los Angeles.

A Rare Show

“This exhibit is a primer to one of the greatest movements of American art in this century,” said Michael Botwinick, museum director. “You won’t see abstract art in this kind of depth anywhere (else)in Southern California.”

The small Addison Gallery, a department of the Phillips Academy of Andover, Mass., has long been devoted to collecting contemporary works by American artists. Botwinick and Addison director Jock Reynolds are friends--one reason the Newport museum was selected as the inaugural site for the exhibit’s national tour.

“The Addison is very unusual,” Botwinick said. “It’s part of a prep school that has had great artists like Frank Stella as students. Abstract art is the gallery’s strength.”

Feast for the Eyes

Guests wandered among works by well-known artists such as Georgia O’Keefe, Frank Stella and Peter Halley. Bud and Alison Frenzel, founders chairwoman, admired an abstract metal sculpture called “Structure of Arches” by David Smith that they sponsored for the show.

“David Smith did this in 1939 but he could have done it yesterday,” said Bud Frenzel, who is in his second year of sculpting class at the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach. “It’s how each person interprets the work. I can see a plowshare and a bird with teeth and geometric shapes. It’s a little life science mixed with the industrial influence.”

The exhibit includes 90 paintings and sculptures dating back to the 1920s.

“It’s interesting to see what was contemporary in the 1950s,” said Debbie Grenn-Scott, spokeswoman for Cartier.

About half of Cartier’s corporate donations go to the arts. In addition to supporting the Newport Harbor and other museums, the company has a foundation for contemporary art near Paris.

“This museum is very well appreciated in Europe,” said Gail Winston, spokeswoman for Cartier. “They love the space and the installations.”

Artistic Edibles

After seeing the show, guests gathered outside in the museum’s patio for the champagne reception.

Waiters circulated bearing plates of hors d’oeuvres that were works of art themselves. The fare included marinated salmon with corn blinis, goat cheese with zucchini, shrimp quesadillas, odd potato chips with duck confit and chicken roulade with curry.

Patina Chef Joachim Splichal, fresh from feeding a crowd of 1,200 from the Grammy Awards the night before, supervised in the kitchen. He showed off a plate of perfectly prepared tartlettes, cookies and chocolates.

“Each one has only 1,250 calories,” he joked.

Others attending were Joan Beall, president of the museum board, Harry Bubb, Michael and Renee Kang, Jim Selna, John Martin Shea, Robert and Margaret Sprague, Richard and Betty Steele, David and Maggie Steinmetz, and David and Jeanne Tappen.