Mexico’s Masters

In its first major step toward raising its profile as a hub for Latin American art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will announce today the acquisition of what experts in the field are calling one of the largest collections of 20th century Mexican art in the United States.

Los Angeles- and Palm Springs-based collectors and art gallery owners Bernard and Edith Lewin, 91 and 86, respectively, will turn over to the museum more than 1,800 works by Mexican artists, including Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo and Jose Clemente Orozco. The Lewins amassed the collection over more than 40 years. A special exhibition will open at the museum Nov. 23 to display about 90 of the works. It will be the first of several planned by the museum to explore the contributions of Mexican Modernist artists. Portions of the collection also will be rotated in a permanent collection gallery.

In exchange for the collection, the Lewins will receive an annuity for an undisclosed amount. Museum officials called the sum “hugely smaller than the value of the collection,” which they estimate at about $25 million.

Scholars in the field applauded the news Thursday. Edward J. Sullivan, chairman of the department of fine arts at New York University and a leading scholar of Mexican art, said: “I think it’s fabulous--it certainly gives LACMA the premier collection in the United States of Mexican Modernist work.”

Art historian Shifra Goldman, who teaches Latin American art at UCLA, called the acquisition a “significant move” for Latin American art in Los Angeles.

Plans for Study Center

In an interview Thursday, museum President Andrea Rich said LACMA plans to eventually make the Lewin collection the core of a permanent special study center for Latin American art.

“One of our various strengths is our collection of pre-Columbian and ancient Mexican art from centuries ago,” she said. “By bringing [modern Mexican art] in, we’ve begun to cover the whole spectrum, and hope to integrate these [works] with many, many exhibitions.”

LACMA Director Graham W.J. Beal said the collection is of obvious significance to Los Angeles “not only artistically, but demographically, something we don’t have in depth at LACMA. To be able to acquire a collection of this breadth and depth in one fell swoop doesn’t happen very often.”

Bernard Lewin was born in 1906 in Wiesbaden, Germany, and fled the Nazis in 1938 with his wife and 4-year-old son, Ralph. Settling in Los Angeles, Lewin owned the B. Lewin furniture stores in Van Nuys, Glendale and North Hollywood, exhibiting artworks alongside household items until he closed the stores in the mid-1970s. The couple began by collecting American artists, but moved to collecting Mexican art on Bernard Lewin’s first trip to Mexico City in 1958. From 1968 until last July he and his wife owned and operated the B. Lewin Galleries, first in Beverly Hills and later in Palm Springs.

The Lewin collection’s greatest strength lies in its extensive holdings of work by Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991), including a survey of 27 easel paintings representing every phase of the Oaxaca-born artist’s long career.

The collection also includes 23 drawings, watercolors and sketches by muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957), as well as a large 1931 oil portrait of a poet friend named John Dunbar and a small, slightly later portrait of Rivera’s wife, artist Frida Kahlo (1910-1954). Rivera often incorporated Kahlo’s image into his murals and frescoes, but Beal said the portrait represents the only known easel painting by the artist of his wife.

The collection also provides LACMA with its first work by Kahlo, a 1951 still life titled “Weeping Coconuts,” painted three years before her death. The Lewins will retain ownership of both the Rivera portrait of Kahlo and “Weeping Coconuts” until their deaths, but the works will be on loan to LACMA until then.

Other highlights include the undated “Revolutionaries in a Landscape” by Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), said by museum officials to be a rare and unusually fine example of the muralist’s easel painting, and several drawings and paintings from the 1960s by muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974), who, with Rivera and Orozco, made up the group called “los tres grandes” for their revolutionary mural paintings of the 1920s and 1930s.

The collection includes 14 works by Guatemalan-born Carlos Merida, an abstractionist who moved to Mexico in his late 20s.

LACMA already had in its collection Rivera’s major 1925 painting, “Flower Day.”

In a sense, the Lewin acquisition is a follow-up to LACMA’s 1991 presentation of the landmark exhibition “Mexico: Splendors of 30 Centuries.” That show, organized by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, was extremely popular locally, and was brought here in part through the efforts of Miguel Angel Corzo, currently director of the Getty Conservation Institute and at the time president of Friends of the Art of Mexico. Corzo also played a large part in LACMA’s acquisition of the Lewin collection.

“I met [the Lewins] through a friend who has a gallery. . . . I was just so intrigued by the fact that this gentleman had so completely fallen in love with Mexico, and Mexican art and artists, that he had managed to put together this rather astonishing array of modern and contemporary Mexican art,” Corzo said.

“He kept it in two warehouses in Palm Springs. When you walked into the warehouses, he would start flipping through the paintings the way you would flip through a card catalog,” Corzo said. “It was sort of surrealistic, very Mexican in that way, like those wonderful novels of Latin American [writers].

“And one day he said to me: ‘What should I do with my collection?’ ”

Corzo acknowledged with a laugh that he first considered acquiring the collection for the Getty Museum, but it became clear to him that the works fit better into the panoramic survey provided by LACMA’s holdings.

Collection Seen as a ‘Major Coup’

Corzo asked Margarita Nieto, a writer and art historian who teaches Chicano studies and humanities at Cal State Northridge, to help photograph and document the vast collection. “We knew about the collection of course, but I don’t think any of us were prepared for what we saw behind closed doors,” Nieto said.

“The major aspects of this collection are the Tamayos--this is the largest collection of his work anywhere, spanning his entire career,” she said. “[And] the sketchbooks of Rivera from the ‘30s are very insightful. . . . I would dare say they are going to be as insightful as Picasso’s sketchbooks. It’s a major coup for the museum, and they are going to do well by it.”

Art historian Goldman curated an exhibition of 90 works from the Lewin collection in 1994 for the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana. She called the acquisition of the Lewins’ holdings a significant move for Latin American art in Los Angeles, but cautioned that the works constitute a “dealer’s collection, rather than a museum collection,” and contain many less important works among the stronger ones. She noted that much of the collection focuses on artworks from 1950 to the present, rather than the 1920s and ‘30s, the heyday of the Mexican muralists.

Corzo acknowledged that the bulk of the collection is later works, but sees that as an advantage, not a flaw. “The period of the 1950s through the 1990s has become the real Mexico,” he said. “It’s going to be very fresh. There was life after the 1920s and the 1930s; the artists didn’t hang up their brushes. I don’t think it’s a flaw, I think it’s different.”

NYU’s Sullivan believes the collection includes many works with an appeal far beyond the scholarly. “Among the Orozcos and the Tamayos and the Riveras, there are really things that anyone, even someone who has very little knowledge of Mexican art, would be interested in seeing,” he said.

Sullivan added that New York’s Museum of Modern Art may have more Mexican Modernist works than LACMA will, but does not exhibit more than three or four of them at a time. The New York museum has “such great things, but you can virtually never see them,” Sullivan said. “With this addition, LACMA will certainly rival the Modern, particularly if they put the collection on view.”

Times art critic Christopher Knight contributed to this report.

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Highlights of the Lewin Collection

Frida Kahlo

* “Weeping Coconuts” (1951)

Oil on canvas

9” x 12”

*

Carlos Merida

* “Cubos” (1936)

Oil on canvas

26 3/4” x 22”

* “Abstract Wood Relief” (1966)

Mixed media

42” x 24”

*

Jose Clemente Orozco

* Untitled (known as “Revolutionaries in a Landscape”; undated)

Oil on Masonite

24” x 35 1/2”

* “Mother” (1935)

Oil on board

10 1/4” x 8 1/4”

*

Diego Rivera

* “Portrait of Frida Kahlo” (circa 1939)

Oil on canvas

8 1/2” x 14”

* “Portrait of John Dunbar” (1931)

Oil on canvas

78 1/2” x 62”

* “Girl From Santa Fe, New Mexico” (1931)

Oil on canvas

20” x 15 1/2”

*

David Alfaro Siqueiros

* “Mountains” (1964)

Oil on board

23 1/2” x 17 3/4”

*

Rufino Tamayo

* “Still Life” (1928)

Oil on canvas

19 1/4” x 22 5/8”

* “Bird Charmer” (1944)

Oil on canvas

41” x 31”