ART NOTES : Caillebotte a LACMA Coup

In a piece of fancy footwork that amounts to a coup, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has landed a major retrospective of works by French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte.

The exhibition of about 90 paintings and 30 drawings by a keen observer of late 19th-Century Paris is scheduled to appear at the museum from June 23 through Sept. 10.

The show--jointly organized by the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago--was a big event in Paris this fall when it premiered at the Grand Palais. Chicago was originally intended to be the only U.S. venue for Caillebotte (from Feb. 18 through May 28), but the itinerary has been extended to include Los Angeles.

“It’s good news for us,” says LACMA curator J. Patrice Marandel. “The show was highly successful in Paris. We have every reason to think it will do as well in Chicago, and we should have a great attendance in Los Angeles, where there is a lot of interest in Impressionism.”

Caillebotte’s work is relatively little-known apart from his 1877 masterpiece “Rue de Paris: temps de pluie,” a wide-angle street scene populated by elegant Parisians strolling under umbrellas.

But Marandel expects the artist to find an appreciative audience in Los Angeles: “I think it’s a good moment for Caillebotte. He is a very direct painter, very matter of fact, and I think people are receptive to that now.”

But even as Marandel looks forward to the June event, he heaves a sigh of relief over a narrowly averted disaster. Welcome as the Caillebotte show may be, it is a last-minute substitution for a long-planned exhibition that fell apart when loans of key works could not be secured.

“I’ll tell you exactly what happened,” Marandel says, launching into a tale about the frustrations of organizing major international exhibitions.

The subject in this case was “Cezanne and Pissarro: An Impressionist Collaboration,” a joint project of LACMA, the Musee d’Orsay and the Royal Academy in London.

The exhibition was conceived as a comparison of works by the two artists, Marandel says. But loans were very difficult to get, he says, and indeed some became impossible. The premise of the show depended on drawing parallels between specific pieces, so substitutions wouldn’t do. The project finally had to be abandoned, adding scheduling chaos to disappointment.

The solution for Marandel came when he visited the Caillebotte show in Paris and noticed that it was scheduled to close in Chicago exactly a month before “Cezanne and Pissarro” was to have opened at LACMA. Although other American museums had requested the Caillebotte retrospective, Marandel prevailed on his French colleagues who had been working with him on “Cezanne and Pissarro” to help bring it to Los Angeles.

Caillebotte (1848-94) was fascinated with modern life in Paris and often made the city his subject, depicting its architecture, bridges, boulevards and workers in dramatically receding space. He was also an important collector who used a considerable portion of his inherited fortune to buy the work of his better-known contemporaries--Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Cezanne, Degas and Manet--which he donated to the French government.

Four paintings by Caillebotte were shown at LACMA in 1984 in “A Day in the Country,” one of the most popular exhibitions in the museum’s history. All those works, including “Le Pont d’Argenteuil,” will return in June, along with dozens of others that have never been exhibited here. Highlights include a luminous painting of three men scraping paint off a wood floor, from the Musee d’Orsay’s collection, and “Rue de Paris: temps de pluie,” a prized possession of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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EYE ON ANTIQUITIES: The J. Paul Getty Museum’s lecture series on an exhibition of the Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman antiquities collection winds up Thursday at 8 p.m. with “The Collector’s Eye: Connoisseurship in the Fleischman Collection,” by Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta.

“My talk will be a look at some of the finest works in the Fleischman collection, leavened with contemporary commentary on the place of classical art in an increasingly divisive intellectual climate,” Anderson says. “I’ll be navigating between the shock waves of multiculturalism and archeological reductivism,” he adds, referring to debates about the hegemony of European culture and the propriety of collecting antiquities.

Admission to the lecture is free, but reservations are required: (310) 458-2003.

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REMEMBERING BETTY: “The Art Cup,” a memorial exhibition and sale in honor of Los Angeles art patron and collector Betty Asher, is at the Garth Clark Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., through Jan. 4.

Asher was a pioneering collector of Pop art, but she was probably best known for her cup collection--a huge cache of artist-made cups, most of which she donated to LACMA. Asher invited artists she admired to contribute original cups, as well as paintings and photographs of cups, to the current exhibition.

She died on May 11 while the show was still in the works, but the gallery has completed her plans in a presentation of works by 57 artists.