Sam Spiegel’s Biggest Deal : Art: The Israel Museum is given the bulk of the late film producer’s world-class collection. ‘This is an important event in our cultural life,’ its director says.

The origins, the whys and wherefores of film producer Sam Spiegel’s collection of Impressionist and modern art are lost among the many myths that made him a larger-than-life figure even in Hollywood.

One story has it that Spiegel was competing with his friend Edward G. Robinson to see who could build the richer collection; another version is that his films--”The African Queen,” “On the Waterfront,” “Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Lawrence of Arabia” among them--were earning more money than he could reinvest.

“These guys wanted to show that they weren’t Philistines,” recalled Marvin Josephson, the head of International Creative Management Inc. and a friend of Spiegel. “It was very fashionable to show not just their wealth, but their cultural level, too. With Sam, though, it was really for himself and not for show.”

Over three decades of very serious buying and very little selling, Spiegel’s collection gradually filled his Park Avenue duplex in New York--even the bathrooms--an apartment in London and a villa in southern France. In quality, it came to rival the holdings of some of the world’s biggest museums; in value, it grew to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

There were oils, watercolors, ink sketches, lithographs and bronzes by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Raoul Dufy, Maurice Utrillo, Georg Kolbe, Edouard Manet, Paul Cezanne, Henri Rousseau, Henry Moore, Auguste Rodin and Diego Rivera.

“My father loved art, but what got him started back in the very early ‘50s is hard to say,” said Adam Spiegel, a marketing consultant for theatrical producers in London. “What he left, however, was a treasure of immense pro portions, and his art is as much his legacy as his films.”

The bulk of Spiegel’s collection was given Tuesday by trustees of his estate to the Israel Museum, which will incorporate the 81 pieces into its increasingly important collection of modern art. Although Spiegel died 7 1/2 years ago, legal complications delayed the donation, and the estate had to sell some paintings to pay bequests, taxes and other expenses.

“This is a big boost for us--it puts the museum up into the next class,” Martin Weyl, director of the 28-year-old museum, said of the Spiegel gift. “For a museum, it is no problem to get art, but it can be a big problem to get quality. And this is all quality.”

Some of the works fill major gaps in the collections not only of the Israel Museum but others in Tel Aviv and Haifa. “Israel now has its first Matisses, its first (Pierre) Bonnard,” Weyl said. “We now have Degas, Rousseau and others we lacked. This is an important event in our cultural life.”

But for curator Stephanie Rachum, the interest was not in simply filling the gaps in the museum’s collection but the gaps in the understanding of such artists as Picasso, Gauguin and Cezanne with rarely seen and little studied works.

“Some of Spiegel’s choices are dead-on masterpieces--he chose them well,” Rachum said, walking through a special exhibit to introduce the collection. “Others, however, are early works or works that catch the artist at a crucial point in his development. For me, these hold the most interest, and they are virtually unknown because they were in Sam Spiegel’s dining room for 30 years.”

The collection includes Gauguin’s “Houses at Vaugirard,” painted in 1880 while he was still a stockbroker and a Sunday painter; Picasso’s “Bullfight in the Village,” painted in 1901 with strong gray-blues that hint at the “blue period” that began six months later; and a very early Cezanne, “River Bend,” anticipating later Expressionism.

In these terms, perhaps the most important work in the collection is Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka’s “The Elbe at Dresden,” which in its use of blocks of strongly contrasting colors manages to be both representation and abstract in its portrayal of the German town.

“The creative process clearly interested Spiegel, and he did not lack courage in buying what he liked and thought important,” Rachum said. “He did not buy ‘pretty pictures,’ but pictures that were interesting, strong and powerful.”

Spiegel also bought many pictures of women--so many, in fact, that the exhibition features a room full of female nudes. “The female figure was a very popular subject for painters of that era,” Adam Spiegel said with a laugh, “and, of course, Sam always enjoyed the company and pleasure of women.”

“Particularly young women,” Raya Dreben, Spiegel’s niece, a Massachusetts state appeals court judge and one of his executors, said, cutting in. “Sam’s appreciation of women was real, but it was also part of his legend. . . .

“As a collector, Sam chose artists before they became fashionable,” Dreben continued. “He bought (British painter) Francis Bacon very, very early. He was a student of art. He had a fantastic collection of art books. He went to every exhibition, every museum in every city he visited. He knew the dealers in New York, London and Paris. Above all, however, he had the good taste, the self-confidence and, of course, the money that it takes to build such a collection.”

Describing the works that Spiegel gathered over the years as “a very good, strong collection of early modern art,” Maurice Tuchman, senior curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said that “it was of the kind that many savvy New Yorkers bought at extremely good prices in the late 1950s--high museum quality work by the School of Paris.”

Tuchman, who knew Spiegel from the early 1960s, added, “In those days, the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, if you had a decent eye, good taste and a reputable art adviser, it was a fabulous time to acquire major modern painting and sculpture. The selection was immense.”

Spiegel, he continued, was “part of a whole phenomenon--a group of producers and directors, many Jewish and all shrewd, who were vying with each other, buying major art from a handful of art dealers, and forming superb collections.

“None had allegiance to Los Angeles,” Tuchman said. “They had New York apartments and generally housed their collections there. Here they would keep the Dufy; there they would keep the Picasso and the Braque.”

Times staff writer Barbara Isenberg in Los Angeles contributed to this report.