The Consummate Collector : Through his acquisitions between the wars, Oskar Reinhart searched for the foundations of his life. Some clues are on display at the L.A. County Museum, but for the full story you have to go to Switzerland

Private art collections get assembled for many different reasons, and they can assume any of a wide array of formats. Beginning in the 1910s, but mostly in the 1920s and early 1930s, Oskar Reinhart, the son of a wealthy Swiss businessman with international interests in coffee, cotton and other goods, assembled an astonishing group of about 125 paintings, several dozen drawings and a few sculptures. Together, they tell a highly personal, eccentrically perceptive tale.

While Reinhart was busy assembling this remarkable private collection, he was also engaged in establishing a second, highly specific collection that later became a public foundation. Currently, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is hosting a selection of more than 100 paintings from some 600 Reinhart bought in order to survey Romantic art produced in Switzerland, Germany and Austria in the late-18th and early-19th-Centuries. (The show remains at LACMA through Jan. 2, after which it will travel to New York’s Metropolitan Museum, London’s National Gallery and Geneva’s Museum of Art and History.) The paintings in the Reinhart Foundation, usually housed in a museum that was a former boys school built in downtown Winterthur during the Romantic period, have been allowed to leave Switzerland for the very first time while a much-needed renovation of the building is completed.

The 600 paintings in the Oskar Reinhart Foundation form the kind of geographic survey of a specific period you expect to find in a museum. By contrast, the smaller Oskar Reinhart Collection is of a rare and special type--so rare and special as to perhaps constitute a category of one. What is exciting is not simply that the holdings are of a remarkably high and consistent quality--although, as comfortably installed in Reinhart’s large but unostentatious home, Am Romerholz, in this small industrial city northeast of Zurich about 30 minutes by train, it is certainly that. In addition to extraordinary groups of 11 paintings and drawings by Cezanne and six by Van Gogh, there are breathtaking pictures by Matthias Grunewald, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, Gerard David, Pieter Bruegel, Nicholas Poussin, Goya, Chardin, Ingres, Courbet, Manet and on and on.

Paintings by lesser-known artists also lean toward the exemplary. An “Annunciation” (c. 1420) by an unidentified Northern European artist arrays the traditional accouterments of the scene with a sweet simplicity carried by gem-like chromatic brilliance. Geertgen tot Sint Jans is an obscure Haarlem painter, but his “Adoration of the Magi” (c. 1480) uses a captivating vision of simple piety to re-create a biblical story more often told in grandiose terms. Philips Koninck’s majestic “Landscape With Town on Hillside” (1651) maps the Dutch terrain through a dramatic play of shifting light. And there are others.

In part, pictures such as these become exceptionally compelling because Reinhart bought them for a specific purpose. He approached collecting in a manner that is today almost impossible to imagine.

Knocked out as a young man by the work of Cezanne, Van Gogh and other Postimpressionist painters, he quickly expanded his interests to include the French Impressionists that had immediately preceded them. Once hooked, Reinhart began to ponder the ancestry of their prominent pictorial qualities.

He admired the late-19th-Century French emphasis on painterly brushwork and sophisticated color. He was drawn to the sympathetic treatment of ordinary genre subjects. He noted that contemporary motifs often veiled classical compositions. And, perhaps most of all, he cherished the highly personal expressiveness of Postimpressionist art.

You could say that, having been born in 1885, at the very moment Cezanne and Van Gogh were transforming Western painting, Reinhart’s curiosity about the origins of this work--an art specific to his own time--was transformed into a philosophical quest. Through art collecting, he searched for the foundations of his own life.

So, he made a list. Working backward through time, to the earliest stirrings of the Italian Renaissance at the turn of the 15th Century, Reinhart considered those European artists whose work he felt bore some ancestral relation to the art of his day. He set out to acquire the very finest example available by every artist on his list.

This was no small ambition, especially given the competition from other private and public collectors of the day. Furthermore, the Swiss collector was also busy acquiring Romantic art.

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Reinhart’s foundation holdings in Romantic painting and his private collection of Postimpressionism’s lineage are separate and distinct. Still, a strong, self-evident link can be discerned between them. Romanticism was the eruption at the 19th-Century’s start that made possible the flowering of modern painting at the century’s end. The enchanted work of Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, Christen Kobke and others in the LACMA show all speak of an intense identification with nature, an often melancholic emphasis on the past and a faith in the primacy of human feeling. These traits would, in very different form, characterize the later work of Cezanne and Van Gogh.

As distinct from his foundation, however, Reinhart’s personal collection at Am Romerholz is never allowed to travel. No loans from or to the collection are accepted, nor further acquisitions made. Everything is installed on the first floor of the house and in the capacious, sky-lighted gallery wing adjacent, pretty much as the bachelor-collector left it when he died in 1965, shortly after his 80th birthday.

A thought-through precision marks Reinhart’s approach to collecting. He didn’t just buy Van Gogh or Cezanne to have the artist represented. Instead, his four paintings by Van Gogh cover the artist’s waterfront, with one still life, one portrait, one interior, one landscape.

The seven paintings by Cezanne, each better than the next, exhibit similar comprehensiveness: three still lifes, two portraits (including a self-portrait) and two landscapes. Bathers and Mont Ste. Victoire--crucial subjects in Cezanne’s oeuvre-- are found in watercolors.

The remarkableness is further enhanced by the speed with which Reinhart assembled these holdings. He could certainly be patient: He had first admired Manet’s “At the Cafe” (1878) in a German private collection while still a young man, but it wasn’t until 1953 that the picture became available. Reinhart snapped it up.

However, most of his personal collection was complete by the end of the 1930s. A handsome, newly published catalogue of the collection shows how it came together. In most every case, the book identifies the year in which each picture was acquired--fascinating information that more museum catalogues would do well to cite.

The scant five years between 1923 and 1928 saw almost one-third of the finished collection already in place. In 1923 alone, Reinhart acquired at least 22 paintings. Among them are the Sint Jans; Pieter Huys’ hallucinatory vision of St. Christopher wading through a monstrous river, originally (and believably) misattributed to Hieronymous Bosch; four Cezannes; a Van Gogh; two each by Delacroix, Corot, Manet and Renoir; and individual Impressionist pictures by Sisley, Pissarro and Degas.

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Although the museum is open to the public, going to the residential neighborhood in the hills just outside the city’s center is more like visiting the private home it once was. Everything about Am Romerholz is marked by an uncanny sense of unfolding personal history, which is enhanced by the collection’s intimately scaled domestic setting.

If the collection is extraordinary for its attempt to trace a European artistic lineage from the early-20th Century back in time to the early-15th Century, it is also notable for the kind of pictures thought appropriate to the task. You won’t find altarpieces or court paintings at Am Romerholz. This is not a story told through grand, publicly scaled or motivated works of art, commissioned for the church or state.

Instead, when the flickering color of 16th-Century Venetian religious painting is represented, it’s the rustic, down-home elegance of Jacopo Bassano that you find. For 18th-Century France, Fragonard’s familiar, frothy odes to courtly pomp and circumstance are forsaken in favor of his literary side, shown in three drawings of the adventures of Don Quixote. The sparkling Watteau depicts an idyllic picnic--a luncheon on the grass that anticipates the pivotal modern subject of Manet and Monet.

Bruegel’s great “The Adoration of the Magi in the Snow” (1567) is a signature work in this regard. Its Christian subject has been transported from Bethlehem to Flanders. A heavy snowfall descends on the manger scene, while the arrival of supplicant kings to pay homage to the newborn is practically hidden away off to one side, behind a bustling array of peasants and burghers going about their industrious daily business.

With pictures such as these, the Reinhart collection tells its story largely through the history of private, domestic patronage. The distinction is significant. After all, Reinhart was himself the privileged son of a wealthy businessman, and he was assembling a collection in Switzerland principally in the years between the two World Wars. His unusual holdings are a personal interpretation of the arrival of Postimpressionism to modern prominence, but the collection likewise charts the ascendant social triumph of a private merchant class, to which the collector himself belonged. In a sense, its history is pictured in the Reinhart Collection, whose existence demonstrates the triumph.

Not everything Reinhart bought is first-rate. He had a sweet tooth for late Renoir--a failing common among collectors of the day. (This misstep is tempered by a fine picture of two young women from 1878, within the artist’s strongest period, and by an early, monumental still life.) Still, within the larger orbit of such a highly focused assembly of Western art, even these flaws take on a certain independent interest: The fashionable taste in the 1920s for robust nudes in classical poses rendered in an approved modern style represents the stubbornness of traditional conservatism.

Like the great Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which is emblematic of the taste of an aristocratic, late-Victorian woman, Am Romerholz exerts a dual claim on our attention. It’s unusually important for the many astonishing individual works with which it is composed, while the emergent sensibility of a modern European merchant class is splendidly arrayed.