Vincent Does the Town

“Van Gogh’s Van Goghs: Masterpieces From the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam”--an exhibition of 70 paintings opening Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--is the biggest show of works by the immensely popular Dutch artist to come to town in three decades. As might be expected, the long-awaited, heavily promoted event has set off an epidemic of Van Gogh fever. Hailed as a blockbuster long before advance ticket sales started, the exhibition is expected to pack in 900,000 visitors during its 17-week run.

But even as the staff prepares for the onslaught at LACMA West--the museum’s annex in the former May Co. building, where “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs” will be installed--the museum’s curators are making additional plans to feed the fever. So are their colleagues at other local institutions.

And they are putting out the word: LACMA West isn’t the only place in Los Angeles to see Van Gogh. His work and that of French Impressionists and Postimpressionists from the same period can be seen all over town in permanent collections and special exhibitions.

Beginning Jan. 21 at LACMA, those who leave “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs” wishing to know more can learn about one aspect of his work by strolling over to the Pavilion for Japanese Art, at the east end of the museum’s campus, where “Van Gogh and the Japanese Print” will be on view through May 16. In organizing the show, Robert Singer, the museum’s curator of Japanese art, and associate curator Hollis Goodall have assembled about 35 works to illustrate the influence of Japanese woodblock prints on Van Gogh.

Like several of his celebrated peers, including Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh was fascinated with the strong colors, striking compositions and exotic subject matter of Japanese printmakers such as Hiroshige and Hokusai. Van Gogh also read about Japan and envisioned it as a utopian paradise. Sometimes the visual results of his studies were relatively subtle, as in dignified portraits of ordinary workers or Japanese-flavored bridges in Provencal landscapes.

But the print show will focus on clear evidence of Van Gogh’s interest in Japanese art, both in prints that he reinterpreted as paintings--including Keisai Eisen’s “Courtesan,” Hiroshige’s “Rain on Ohashi Bridge” and “Blossoming Plum at Kameido Shrine”--and in images he collected. Photographs of related paintings by Van Gogh will be displayed alongside prints from his collection so that viewers can compare them.

LACMA has no paintings by Van Gogh in its permanent collection, but visitors can see a few works by his illustrious contemporaries in its galleries of Impressionist and Postimpressionist art. Gauguin is represented by two colorful landscapes, “Swineherd, Brittany” and “The Red Cow,” painted in 1888 and 1889, respectively, when Van Gogh created many of his late trademark works. Among Impressionist paintings on view are Monet’s “Beach at Honfleur” and Paul Cezanne’s “Still Life With Cherries and Peaches.”

Although LACMA temporarily will be Southern California’s Van Gogh Central, local art aficionados know that the best place to see works by the artist and his circle day in and day out is the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. Simon collected broadly over a period of about 35 years, but he began with Impressionism, in 1954, and never lost interest in the movement or its sequel, Postimpressionism. A few years before his death, in 1993, Simon still spoke with great enthusiasm about the Van Goghs in his collection.

Van Gogh’s career was short but very productive, and his style evolved quite rapidly. The Simon collection contains relatively early works, painted in 1885 in the Netherlands--including a frosty landscape, “The Parsonage Garden in the Snow,” and a dark portrait, “Head of a Peasant Woman With a White Bonnet”--as well as later, vividly colored portraits of the artist’s mother and a peasant farmer. Another late painting, “The Mulberry Tree,” depicts a tree with brilliant yellow foliage, fairly bristling with energy.

Simon also amassed one of the nation’s largest and best holdings of Degas’ work, including pastels, paintings and a unique set of bronze master casts of ballet dancers and horses. Many examples are on view at the museum in recently refurbished galleries, along with paintings by Cezanne, Gauguin, Monet, Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro.

While Simon was collecting many of these works, one of his finest Van Goghs got away, but it didn’t go far. In one of many efforts to redefine his art holdings and raise money to buy still more art, Simon sold Van Gogh’s 1889 painting “Hospital at Saint-Remy” for $1.2 million at a 1971 auction. The buyer was none other than oil magnate Armand Hammer, another major Los Angeles collector.

Simon had purchased the painting 10 years earlier for $380,000, so he was pleased with his profit at the auction. But 16 years later, when Van Gogh’s painting “Irises” brought a record $53.9 million at Sotheby’s New York, Hammer could hardly stop bragging about how smart he had been to snap up his Van Gogh at a bargain price.

If “Irises,” which depicts a small patch of the hospital garden at Saint-Remy, had been sold for $53.9 million, Hammer reasoned, his painting of the entire hospital and surrounding landscape was surely worth much more--maybe $100 million, maybe $500 million. Whatever sum it might actually bring on the current market, the painting is now the most valuable piece in the permanent collection of the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center in Westwood.

Sotheby’s sold “Irises” to Australian businessman Alan Bond in 1987. But in a strange turn of events, the painting subsequently came to Los Angeles, in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum. The Getty purchased the painting for an undisclosed price in 1990, after Bond defaulted on his payments to the auction house.

“Irises” is by far the most popular painting at the Getty--attracting a cluster of viewers even on the quietest days--but the museum is celebrating “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs” by making its own famous painting the centerpiece of a special presentation, “Vincent’s Irises.” Two related Van Gogh paintings, “Iris,” on loan from the National Gallery of Canada, and “Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin,” from Harvard University Art Museums, will accompany the Getty’s “Irises” from Tuesday through March 21.

Nearby, Getty visitors will also find two paintings by Monet--a seminal early work, “Sunrise” (1873), and a prime example of the mature artist’s portrayal of haystacks in different seasons and times of day, “Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, Morning” (1891). Other notable works from the same period include Manet’s street scene, “The Rue Mosnier With Flags,” painted in 1878, a few years before Van Gogh became an artist, and Paul Cezanne’s “Still Life With Apples,” made in 1893-94, after Van Gogh’s death, in 1890.

In a fortuitous coincidence, the Getty will also present a special traveling exhibition of a little known aspect of Degas’ work while “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs” is at LACMA. “Edgar Degas, Photographer,” the first major presentation of the Impressionist painter’s photographic achievements, will be on view from Feb. 2-March 28. Jointly organized by the Getty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris in cooperation with the Musee d’Orsay, the critically acclaimed show consists mainly of photographic figure studies, self-portraits and portraits made in the 1890s, after Degas completed most of his paintings.

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Where to See Masterpieces

* Norton Simon Museum of Art: Permanent collection contains Van Goghs and the work of other Impressionists and Postimpressionists. 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. Open Thursdays to Sundays, noon to 6 p.m. (626) 449-6840.

* UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center: Van Gogh’s 1889 painting “Hospital at Saint-Remy,” in the permanent collection, goes on view Jan. 26, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. Open Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sundays 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. (310) 443-7000.

* The Getty Center: “Vincent’s Irises,” Tuesday through March 21, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Parking reservations required. (310) 440-7300.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art: “Van Gogh and the Japanese Print,” Jan. 21 through May 16 at the Pavilion for Japanese Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon to 8 p.m.; Fridays, noon to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. (323) 857-0000.

* LACMA West: “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs,” Sunday through May 16, 6067 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. Open daily 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tickets issued for specific dates and times. (323) 857-6000. Tickets: (213) 462-2787.