A feast of master prints

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is celebrating three birthdays with “Durer to Rembrandt: Master Prints From the Herman and Ruth Engel Collection,” a 40-piece exhibition that opened Thursday and will run through Sept. 18. Both the museum and its Graphic Arts Council, a private support group, hit 40 this year. And collector and longtime LACMA patron Engel and his wife have promised to donate the works in the show to the museum to mark not only those milestones but his 100th birthday.

Nor is that all there is to the story. If some of the prints could talk, they would recall a harrowing departure from Nazi Germany, where they might have become part of Hitler’s loot.

Engel fled his homeland in 1936 with his family’s collection of prints by German artist Albrecht Durer and Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn -- and little else. He arrived in the United States in 1939 and eventually revived the family tradition of collecting art. Initially settling on the East Coast, he made his living by, among other things, working at a dartboard factory and the Library of Congress before developing a career with the U.S. government in defense mapping and intelligence. He and his wife moved to Los Angeles in 1984 and promptly joined the Graphic Arts Council. They are now the senior active members of the group.

The Engels’ promised gift will add 25 works by Durer to the museum’s collection, including impressions of “Nemesis” and “Hercules” and examples of the artist’s “Engraved Passion” and “Virgin and the Apocalypse” series. The best-known print is probably “Melencolia I,” an engraving praised by Kevin Salatino, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings, as “one of the most beautiful, influential and enigmatic images of the Renaissance.”

LACMA will also receive Rembrandt etchings of “The Sacrifice of Abraham” and “Sts. Peter and Paul Healing the Cripple at the Gate of the Temple.” Other highlights include a hand-colored woodcut by Lucas Cranach, two engravings by Lucas van Leyden and works by such artists as Martin Schongauer, Hans Baldung Grien and Heinrich Aldegrever.

The donated prints will fill major gaps in the museum’s Old Master print collection, Salatino says. The Engels’ generosity is particularly appreciated, he says, in light of the scarcity and high prices of such works.

Suzanne Muchnic