LACMA’s other new addition

Amid all the hoopla about the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a Venetian Renaissance painting by Cima da Conegliano has quietly joined LACMA’s collection.

“The Madonna and Child in a Landscape,” a delicately detailed work in oil and tempera made in the 1490s, will go on view today on the third floor of the Ahmanson Building.

Like dozens of other Old Masters at LACMA, the Cima was purchased with funds from the Ahmanson Foundation. But it has special significance as a memorial to Robert H. Ahmanson, the longtime president of the foundation, who died in September.

“A Renaissance painting of this quality is pretty rare,” LACMA Director Michael Govan said. “It will reshape the Italian Renaissance galleries, and I’m told it’s exactly the kind of thing that Bob Ahmanson loved.”

J. Patrice Marandel, the museum’s chief curator of European art, said that he had had his eye out for a “major purchase” as a memorial tribute but that he discovered the Cima serendipitously in a New York gallery. As a matter of policy, the museum did not disclose the purchase price.

“When I saw it, I said, ‘This is just the painting we need.’ It’s perfect,” Marandel said. Although the work was largely unknown to scholars until its recent appearance on the market, its provenance has been tracked through the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was in private collections in England and Germany.

“For us, it’s a major thing,” Marandel said. “Most American museums bought their Cimas in the 1880s to the 1910s. We were not active then, so we have to buy today, when the market has dried out.”

The J. Paul Getty Museum has a drawing attributed to the circle of Cima, but the work at LACMA is the only painting by the artist in a Los Angeles museum.

Although Cima, who lived from about 1459 to 1517, is relatively little known to the public, Marandel characterized him as “a key figure in a new sensibility around 1490 to 1500, when paintings became much more human.”

“There is something very real, immediate and appealing about the relationship between the Madonna and Child and the way they are set in a landscape that evokes Conegliano, a village above Venice,” he said.

The painting fits into a group of works from about the same time, including gifts of William Randolph Hearst that are undergoing restoration and Ahmanson-funded pieces on display, Marandel said. The Cima arrived in a 16th century frame, but the museum has purchased a more appropriate 15th century frame that will be put on the picture soon.

The acquisition also marks the retirement of Leonard E. Walcott Jr., vice president and managing director of the Ahmanson Foundation, although he will continue to act as a liaison between the foundation and the museum.

The foundation has been the museum’s most generous donor over the years, Govan said, and its largess has greatly expanded LACMA’s representation of European art.

The latest gift proves there are still opportunities to collect Old Masters, Govan said. “It’s harder and harder, but it’s not too late.”

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suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com