Beauty beheld

IT’S a fact of art museum life: Temporary exhibitions pack in the crowds, while permanent collection galleries are relatively empty.

These days, look no further than the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where eager visitors are standing in line to see a temporary show of five paintings by Gustav Klimt confiscated by the Nazis and recently returned to the family that lost them. But viewers who wander into the long-term installations of Indian, Islamic or American art are likely to be all but alone.

Nonetheless, permanent collections are the heart and soul of museums, and ours have a lot more than might be imagined. Museums in Southern California have built collections with astonishing strengths as the region has grown into a major cultural center over the last few decades. But these gems are often taken for granted.

Assembling them was not easy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Southern California was too young and unsettled to reap many cultural benefits from the new American wealth that founded the great art collections in East Coast museums. If history were destiny, it could have been a case of too little too late.

After all, in 1919, when Henry Clay Frick died, leaving his magnificent art collection and New York mansion to the public, Norton Simon was a 12-year-old kid in Portland, Ore., helping his dad at the family surplus store, Simon Sells for Less.

In the 1930s, J. Paul Getty began collecting on a relatively modest budget. But during the same period, Andrew Mellon was striking a $7-million deal with the impoverished Soviets to buy 21 pictures from the Hermitage and scooping up an additional 42 works from super dealer Joseph Duveen for $21 million, thus launching the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

In the East, Duveen’s clients included such titans as Frick, Mellon and John D. Rockefeller. Out West, only Henry E. and Arabella Huntington bought up a storm of European artworks from him.

Despite the odds, museums in L.A. and the surrounding area have developed broad collections with surprising stars. Any account of this visual-arts wealth encompasses a broad sweep of history, geography and culture in museums spread across many miles. The Indian and Southeast Asian collections at LACMA and the Norton Simon Museum, for example, are major holdings in themselves but are much more significant when viewed as a single resource.

“If you add it all up, it is a very powerful thing,” said John Murdoch, director of art collections at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. “It’s a series of nodes that can grow over the next half-century into something that will be even more impressive than it would have been if Armand Hammer and Norton Simon and J. Paul Getty had concentrated their largess on a single, central Los Angeles institution.

“That would have been more impressive to us,” he said. “If you rewrite history, you can imagine something downtown, invigorating and providing an extraordinary, potent cultural focus to central Los Angeles. That’s a loss in our generation, but this series of nodes may be a more powerful growth principle for the future.”

To assess the strengths of the local permanent collections, The Times asked a dozen curators and other art specialists to speak about what they consider to be the region’s great art, from ancient to contemporary. The names of some artworks came up over and over, but each person had a distinctive point of view and personal favorites, including some quirky ones. Here’s a sampling:

KEVIN SALATINO

Curator of prints and drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

“The thing that many people forget, because Los Angeles is such a contemporary city, is how good the collections of Old Master paintings are.

“The Getty has one of the great portraits ever painted in any society at any time, the Pontormo ‘Portrait of a Halberdier.’ It is the culmination of the High Renaissance becoming Mannerism, with all that hauteur you associate with Mannerism and yet a vulnerability in the figure, who has never been completely identified. It is magnificent.”

“At the Norton Simon Museum, the great Jacopo Bassano, ‘The Flight Into Egypt,’ is staggering. Bassano wasn’t a household name when Simon bought it and still isn’t, but that painting takes your breath away in terms of color and the presence of those figures.

“The paint becomes so concrete and living. It’s all Venetian color, but there’s something northern about it and hard-edged, the peasant-like quality of the characters, the willingness not to beautify when it isn’t necessary.”

“At LACMA, the Georges de La Tour ‘Magdalen With the Smoking Flame’ is one of L.A.’s masterpieces. There are four versions. Others are at the Met, the National Gallery and the Louvre. I think ours is the most beautiful. It’s the simplest, most elegant, most movingly sorrowful.”

SCOTT SCHAEFER

Curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum

He ticked off his own list of locally owned masterpieces, including several mentioned by others, making special note of, as he put it, “one of the great still lifes of any period in the world”: the Simon museum’s “Still Life With Lemons, Oranges and a Rose,” a 1633 painting by Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbaran.

CAROL ELIEL

Curator of Modern and contemporary art at LACMA

Surrealist Rene Magritte’s painting “The Treachery of Images” -- which combines an image of a pipe with French text stating “This is not a pipe” -- is “a touchstone for contemporary art in so many ways that it is unbelievably important,” she says of the work, which is at LACMA. “I can’t tell you how many people walk into our galleries and say, ‘I didn’t know you have that.’ ”

Edward Kienholz’s sculpture “Back Seat Dodge ‘38” -- a gritty depiction of lust that set off a raging controversy at LACMA in 1966 -- is “one of the great works of California art,” she says. “It has so much of the history of the place wrapped into it that it is absolutely as good as it gets.”

The Getty’s monumental landmark painting by James Ensor, “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889,” also won top marks from Eliel. The dyspeptic view of late 19th century society is “an amazing picture that people don’t expect to see here.”

SHELLEY BENNETT

Curator of British and continental art at the Huntington

“I am bedazzled by masterful handling of paint,” she says. “View on the Stour Near Dedham,” the Huntington’s major landscape by John Constable -- cited by many of her colleagues -- satisfies her passion, but so does the much smaller, related oil sketch, “Flatford Mill From the Lock,” painted far more quickly and intensely with virtuosic results. If she knew an earthquake were coming and could save only one small work of art at the Huntington, that’s what she would grab.

TOM CROW

Director of the Getty Research Institute

He has studied Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines” -- which merge painting and sculpture in orchestrations of found materials -- and concluded that the artist’s relatively small “Painting With Gray Wing” is “an even more accomplished and decisive work” than the widely acknowledged masterpiece, “Untitled Combine (Man With White Shoes),” both of which belong to MOCA.

GLORIA WILLIAMS

A curator at the Norton Simon Museum

She is partial to the octagonal gallery at LACMA that emulates “cabinets of wonders” in European collectors’ palatial homes. The display includes carved ivories, a cup in the form of an owl and a boat-shaped glass vessel.

“In addition to a variety of phenomenally well-crafted objects, it provides a flavor of how and what cultivated princes and aristocrats collected for their intimate quarters,” she says.

JESSICA SMITH

Curator of American art at the Huntington

She oversees a collection that includes Frederic Edwin Church’s spectacular South American landscape, “Chimborazo,” but makes “regular pilgrimages” to the Simon to see Sam Francis’ “Basel Mural I,” a wall-size panel of a historic three-part painting.

POLLY NOOTER ROBERTS

Deputy director and chief curator at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History

She has plenty of favorites in her specialty -- African art -- such as a Kongo “Nikisi Nkondi” power figure and a Luba wood carving of a female figure, but she also takes her students to the more off-the-wall Museum of Jurassic Technology to see a room of stereo floral radiographs by scientist Al Richards.

“You hold an instrument up to your eyes and look into boxes on the wall and the most beautiful images of flowers appear,” she says. “They are like X-rays, very translucent and absolutely mystical.”

For permanent collection highlights, listed by museum, please see Page 32.