The One That Got Away

The news came to Peter C. Keller as a disappointment but not a surprise.

A $25-million art collection including works by such preeminent Mexican modernists as Diego Rivera had been donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. If Keller had courted its owner more ardently, he might be the one trumpeting the acquisition. Instead, the director of the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art is second-guessing himself.

“I may have slipped up a bit by not keeping closer contact” with the donor, Keller said. “But given the size and prestige of LACMA . . . I don’t think we could have competed.”

The Bowers had long had its eye on the 1,800-plus-piece gift that Bernard and Edith Lewin, who live in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, turned over last week to the L.A. museum. The collection of 20th century Mexican art, with major paintings by Rufino Tamayo and Jose Clemente Orozco, would have been a particularly winning catch for Santa Ana because of its predominantly Latino population.

The Bowers’ yearlong pursuit of the art, involving several discussions with the Lewins, began in 1994 after it staged the 75-piece “Seven Decades: Modern Mexican Art From the Bernard Lewin Collection.”

Santa Ana Mayor Miguel A. Pulido became “a very active participant” in the talks, Keller said. The mayor met with potential corporate and individual backers in Santa Ana and Mexico City in hopes of funding “the Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Lewin collection wing at the Bowers,” a museum spokesman said.

Pulido declined to comment on his efforts to woo the Lewins. And Bernard Lewin said this week that he does not recall talking to the Bowers about donating the collection.

“At that time [of the Bowers’ show] I had no intention of turning over this collection to any museum,” he said.

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But Patricia House, the Bowers’ former vice president of programs and development, said she attended a 1994 dinner with Keller, Pulido, Lewin and his friend Sharon Lesk, a trustee of the Anaheim-based Freedman Foundation, which has given the Bowers more than $1 million during the past five years. The dinner had been arranged to ask Lewin to donate his collection.

“It was a good discussion,” recalled House, now a museum management consultant. “Mr. Lewin [said he] was going to consider it.”

Keller went even further.

Toward the end of the year, after more meetings, “we were coming very close to an agreement,” Keller said. Lewin told Bowers officials “he wanted to build a wing with his name on it to house his art, and what he’d really like is to have an annuity to support he and his wife for the rest of their lives. We were quite willing to pursue” both possibilities.

LACMA will pay the Lewins an annuity for an undisclosed amount in exchange for their collection. The museum will eventually construct a 4,000-square-foot gallery suite, probably at its planned off-site satellite in the Wilshire District, to be named the Bernard and Edith Lewin Galleries, LACMA director Graham W.J. Beal said.

Lewin, a former furniture store owner who until recently also owned, with his wife, art galleries in Los Angeles and in Palm Springs, developed a love for Mexican art on his first trip to Mexico City in 1958.

He approached LACMA, he said, after discussing a future home for his collection with Mexican art expert Miguel Angel Corzo, the director of the Getty Conservation Institute.

Keller said Lewin, who is 91, finally told him that he had been talking with the J. Paul Getty Museum about a home for his collection and, later, with another institution, which he did not name. Lewin told Keller that if “things didn’t work out, he’d be back in touch.”

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The Bowers’ 85,000-piece permanent collection focuses on pre-Columbian, American Indian, African and Oceanic objects. It owns only two works by 20th century Mexican artists, one painting each by Vladimir Cora (who has a Santa Ana studio), a Lewin gift, and Maria Izquierdo. Its staff does not include a curator of Mexican art, although hiring one would have been a “high priority,” Keller said, if the museum had scored the Lewin holdings, which have been described by experts as one of the nation’s largest collections of its kind.

“It would have made all the difference for Bowers,” Keller said, “but when you’re told you’re competing with the Getty, what do you say?”