LACMA Buys 46 French Oil Sketches With Ahmanson Funds

Gifts from the Ahmanson Foundation have enabled the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to build a remarkable collection of Old Master and later European paintings. Beginning with a gift of Rembrandt’s “The Raising of Lazarus” in 1972, the L.A.-based foundation has provided several million dollars (exact sums are not disclosed) for a couple of significant new additions every year.

It’s that time again, and the latest acquisition purchased with Ahmanson funds is anything but routine. It’s a group of 46 French oil sketches created in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries by Francois Boucher, Francois Gerard, Louis-Leopold Boilly and Nicolas-Guy Brenet, among 34 artists. Encompassing a wide range of subject matter, the works range from Boilly’s 10 1/2-by-8 3/4-inch portrait “Head of a Woman” to Gerard’s 42-by-56 3/4-inch battle scene “The 10th of August 1792.” The museum does not disclose the purchase price of acquisitions.

“I’m just thrilled with this purchase,” said J. Patrice Marandel, the museum’s chief curator of European paintings and sculpture. “It gives enormous breadth and depth to our collection of French paintings and really puts the museum in the foreground of French paintings, not just in California but in America.”

Far from being mere preliminary drawings, as the term “sketch” might imply, the works are oil paintings made as models or studies for larger works. Many are painted in a full palette. Others are rendered in monochromatic tones or are, in a few cases, unfinished. But all are worthy of display, Marandel said.

“This is not a study collection. It is an exhibition collection that will be shown in its entirety when we have the space for it. In the meantime, we will incorporate some of the pieces in smaller exhibitions,” he said. For starters, five examples are on view in a show of recent 18th century acquisitions in LACMA’s new Masterpieces in Focus Gallery in the Ahmanson Building, through June 24.

Ferreting out prospective additions to the museum’s collection is a major part of Marandel’s job. But the story behind his latest find is as surprising as the acquisition itself. The saga began 31 years ago, when he was a fledgling art historian, recently arrived in New York from his native Paris.

Marandel was looking for work, so a friend, New York University art historian Robert Rosenblum, suggested that he contact Andrew S. Ciechanowiecki, a Polish art collector and dealer who directed the Heim Gallery in London. In the course of doing business with a network of suppliers, Ciechanowiecki built several collections for himself. In the early 1960s, he began to set aside oil sketches with the thought of amassing yet another cache.

“He needed someone to help him with the collection and catalog it,” Marandel said. “Most things were unattributed, so research had to be done from scratch.” Marandel was interested, but the situation presented an ethical problem, he said. “He was a dealer and I wanted to work in museums. In those days, if you had anything to do with the market, you were tainted.

“I had to be very clean about it, so I told him he couldn’t pay me, which he accepted enthusiastically. I also said he couldn’t sell pieces out of the collection or sell the whole collection until quite a few years after he was retired. Finally, I said if I was working at a museum when it came time to sell the collection, I would have first option on it.”

Over the years, while working at several museums, Marandel identified most of the artists who made the oil sketches. “Some were obvious; others were incredible headaches,” he said. “One painting that really bothered me a lot depicted a a Russian subject. For years and years I couldn’t find anything on it. But then one day, on a trip to Russia, I was at the Hermitage and I looked up at the ceiling and there was the painting, by Gabrielle Doyen.”

A couple of uncharacteristic works by Jacques Sablet also had the curator stumped. “By pure accident, I came across a photograph of a painting Sablet made of his studio in a catalog of his work,” Marandel said. “I don’t know what possessed me to look at it under a magnifying glass, but there in the background were all these little paintings hanging on the wall of his studio. And not one but two of them were in the collection.”

Ciechanowiecki amassed about 300 French oil sketches over a period of about 15 years. In the early 1980s, he set up a long-term loan of the collection to the University Art Museum at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. But Marandel--who joined the staff at LACMA in 1993--kept in touch with him and wrote the catalog for a 1994-95 traveling exhibition of the collection, organized by the American Federation of Art.

About four years ago, Marandel began negotiating with Ciechanowiecki to see if he could get what he wanted at an affordable price.

“Ultimately, I came up with 46 paintings, which I selected for their aesthetic quality and their relevance to our collection,” he said. Works by Jean-Leon Gero^me and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux are the first paintings by the artists to enter LACMA’s collection; others add depth to the museum’s holdings. The Carpeaux paintings and works by Jean-Alexandre-Joseph Falguiere were chosen in part to complement sculptures by the same artists in the collection.

Now that the deal is done, Marandel is eager to put the works on view. “These paintings are based on classical subject matter, so at the drop of a hat I can do a show on Alexander the Great or the story of Aeneas,” he said. “This gives us great flexibility in our in-house exhibition program.”