Let’s make an art deal?

The director of the Laguna Art Museum wants to find the unidentified art collector who quietly bought a prized cache of early 20th century California Impressionist paintings from the Orange County Museum of Art -- in hopes of persuading the new owner to donate or sell the 18 works to his museum.

OCMA’s director, Dennis Szakacs, said the museum got $963,000 for the 18 works in a private sale in March that just came to light this week. The museum promised the buyer anonymity.

But experts are saying that two key paintings in the group, Granville Redmond’s “Silver and Gold” and William Wendt’s “Spring in the Canyon,” could each be worth as much as OCMA received for all 18.

Whitney Ganz, director of William A. Karges Fine Art in L.A., added his voice to those astonished that OCMA let its paintings go for $963,000, when the two star attractions alone, in their opinion, should have fetched $1.5 million or more. Ganz noted that a smaller, lesser Redmond, showing poppies growing by a lake, brought $542,000 at an April auction at Bonhams & Butterfields in Los Angeles.

“It’s a very nice painting, but the one OCMA sold is an icon, a major, major painting,” he said, adding that several others in the group should be worth $100,000 or more each. Overall, Ganz said, OCMA “left a ton of money on the table.”

Bolton Colburn, the Laguna museum’s director, said that he hopes to persuade OCMA’s buyer that his institution is the historically, aesthetically and spiritually proper repository for the paintings.

“There are not that many people who could have bought it,” Colburn said, based on Szakacs’ revelation that the buyer is someone in Laguna Beach who has championed plein air painting, as it is often called, and has a track record of lending art to museums. “There are three or four individuals we know about, although there are always people with wherewithal . . . who are under the radar.”

Given the chance, Colburn said, he would try to make the case for the buyer to donate the works because they were in the Laguna museum’s collection for many years, initially given by the artists or their friends and heirs. The Newport Beach-based OCMA acquired them in 1996, when it was established through a merger between the Laguna museum and the Newport Harbor Art Museum.

The union was short-lived, but those pieces remained OCMA’s after the Laguna Art Museum was re-established in 1997.

Colburn’s Plan B would involve cash, on the order of $1 million. “The second appeal,” he said, “would be, ‘Geez, if we could rake together the money, would you sell for what they were purchased for?’ There are a few deep pockets who could put in money. The whole town could get involved, believe me.”

Colburn and Jean Stern, director of the Irvine Museum, have criticized OCMA for selling the works -- known as “deaccessioning” -- privately rather than giving their museums a chance to bid and keep the paintings in the public sphere. Since 2003, OCMA has shifted its collections and exhibitions focus to post-1950 art, and the museum plans to use the sale proceeds to buy more of it. Laguna and the Irvine Museum both collect California Impressionists.

Stern, whose museum can borrow freely from the extensive private holdings of its founder, Joan Irvine Smith, said he’s also interested in finding OCMA’s buyer, less to acquire the works than to be able to provide thorough provenances, or ownership histories, in books the museum publishes on artists in the genre, including upcoming volumes on Guy Rose and Franz Arthur Bischoff, whose paintings are also presumed to be among those OCMA sold.

Another specialist in early California art, Thom Gianetto, director of Edenhurst Gallery in Palm Desert, said Tuesday that 9 1/2 years ago he sold “September Morn,” a Wendt very similar to “Spring in the Canyon,” for $1.2 million. OCMA’s deaccessioned painting was one of only seven 50-by-60-inch paintings by the artists known to exist, Gianetto said.

“It was common knowledge in the industry that we had fetched this price,” he said, adding that “masterpieces tend not to go down in value unless there’s desperation on the part of the owner to cash out. The inherent value doesn’t go down.”

Szakacs, the OCMA director, said by e-mail Monday from Europe that the sale was for the $963,000 only, with no additional payments or “promised gifts of art, money or property.” He added that “the sale was based on both fair price (as determined by our three estimates) and the museum’s desire to keep the works in the community” by selling to a buyer in Orange County rather than risking an auction that could have dispersed them.

Asked whether the buyer had a connection to OCMA, Szakacs wrote, “I can confirm for you that the buyer has had no previous contact with the museum as a past donor, supporter, board member or member of a committee of the museum. This was very important to ensure an arm’s-length transaction and keep within ethical guidelines.”

OCMA has no plans to sell any other works from its collection, Szakacs added.

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mike.boehm@latimes.com