At the Getty, a cache with cachet

What’s new at the J. Paul Getty Museum? A batch of artworks acquired by curatorial sleuthing, big-budget shopping and adroit deal-making -- in one case involving the restitution of Nazi loot.

The additions, to be announced today, encompass a French classical landscape painting by 17th century master Claude Lorrain, a rare double-sided drawing of a Tahitian “Eve” by Postimpressionist Paul Gauguin, a trove of 834 photographs by pioneer photojournalist Felice Beato and a large photo collage of an octopus by Los Angeles artist Tim Hawkinson. Although none of the works is currently on view, they will go up at the museum in the next few months.

The landscape, “Coast View With the Abduction of Europa,” is a signature painting by a French artist -- widely known as Claude -- whose artistic prowess and fascination with the Roman countryside have been widely emulated. With its dazzling atmospheric effects, exquisite detail and solid compositional structure, his work is thought to epitomize the “ideal” landscape, a representation of natural beauty that seems to surpass the real thing.

The Getty’s example ends a decade-long quest by the museum for a painting by Claude, said Scott Schaefer, the museum’s curator of paintings. “The problem is, they rarely come on the market, and when they do, since most Claudes were bought by the English in the 18th century, they tend not to be allowed out of England,” he said.

This one became available when it was returned to a U.S. heir of Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker as part of a trove sold under duress to the Nazis. Goudstikker died in an accident while fleeing his homeland in 1940. The works were returned to the Dutch government and distributed to museums after Goudstikker’s widow settled her claim, but the case was reopened a few years ago.

The heir, Marei von Saher of Greenwich, Conn., eventually received 202 paintings, including the Claude. She consigned many of the works to auction at Christie’s. The Getty purchased the Claude -- which had been displayed at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam -- for an undisclosed sum in a private transaction brokered by the auction house.

“It is one of those odd coincidences that can happen when you build a collection,” Schaefer said. Although the Rotterdam museum lost a treasure, it will go on public view in Los Angeles early next year with other paintings of the period, including Rembrandt’s “Abduction of Europa.” It also will join what Schaefer called “the largest collection of Claude outside England,” composed of single paintings at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; two paintings and seven drawings at the Norton Simon Museum; and four drawings at the Getty.

“Coast View With the Abduction of Europa” was painted in 1645, when the artist was about 40 and had hit his mature stride. The oil on canvas, roughly 3 feet high and 4 feet wide, portrays the mythological tale of Jupiter, who disguised himself as a white bull and enticed Europa, princess of Tyre, to climb on his back so he could carry her across the ocean to Crete. The painting, in near-perfect condition, will go on display when a proper frame is found for it, Schaefer said.

The Gauguin drawing portrays a nude Tahitian woman in a horrific Garden of Eden with shadowy figures and a snake. It grabbed the attention of Lee Hendrix, the museum’s drawings curator, last fall in an exhibition about French avant-garde art dealer Ambroise Vollard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“It’s an astonishing thing,” Hendrix said of the 23-by-17-inch work. “The show was principally a paintings exhibition, but this double-sided drawing sat in a gallery, holding its own against great paintings by the giants of Modernism. It’s like a three- dimensional object. When I saw that it was in a private collection, I had to find out who it belonged to.”

Purchased from an unidentified New York collector, “Eve” is one of 10 experimental “transfer” drawings made by Gauguin in 1899 and 1900 in Tahiti. Vollard had sent Gauguin large sheets of paper and asked him to make marketable watercolors, Hendrix said. Instead, the artist invented a new process of drawing while producing dark scenes of human transgression, shame and guilt.

The process began with the artist slathering a sheet of paper with printer’s ink, placing a second sheet on the inked paper and drawing on the top sheet with graphite and crayon, which caused ink lines to appear on the opposite side. In subsequent steps, Gauguin added ocher and black shading to the ink side.

“It’s a process that pretends to be primitive, but it’s extremely sophisticated, controlled in its shading and calculating in its effect of a weathered patina, where you see surfaces being worn away,” Hendrix said. At the Getty, “Eve” will join an earlier Gauguin portrait of a Tahitian woman and a wood sculpture, “Head With Horns.” Framed to display both sides and mounted on a plinth, “Eve” will debut in an exhibition celebrating the Getty Center’s 10th anniversary.

The cache of Beato’s photographs -- the world’s largest -- offers a comprehensive view of an early chronicler of war and social upheaval in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The Italian-born British artist, who died in 1908, documented such events as the Crimean War with a sense of history and an artistic sensibility that compelled him to improve compositions by rearranging components.

The acquisition is the result of a 20-year project launched by film producer and photography collector Michael Wilson, said Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the Getty. Wilson amassed the collection from dozens of sources and passed it on to the museum as about half purchase, half gift, Naef said. The Beatos will enhance the Getty’s holdings of works by his contemporaries Gustave Le Gray, Roger Fenton, Julia Margaret Cameron and Carleton Watkins.

As for Hawkinson’s improbable “Octopus” -- composed of photographs of the artist’s fingers, hands and lips -- it was commissioned by the Getty for a recent exhibition. A singular work by an artist who sometimes uses photographs as a way of drawing, it complements David Hockney’s photo collage “Pear Blossom Highway” and reflects the collection’s commitment to “the best artists working on our soil,” Naef said.

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suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com