[Quixote]

Originally Posted by Illithid Dude

I know I should probably learn to distance myself from that which is out of my control, but thinking about what they are doing to LACMA makes me physically nauseous. At least Los Angeles is lucky enough to have the Getty.

The LACMA revamp is necessary in order for us to acquire the Perenchio collection (or at least that's what I recall reading), which will do wonders in terms of augmenting LACMA's Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection.

I can't find the original article, but here's a summary of its impact on the collection:

What Perenchio Could Mean for LACMA

For a century at least, Hollywood actors, agents, and moguls have been buying School of Paris modernism. A few assembled great collections; many more assembled weak ones; and the one constant was hand-wringing over Hollywood’s failure to support L.A. museums. TV and film executive Jerry Perenchio is set to change that paradigm with his conditional bequest of an Impressionist and modern collection to LACMA. (Above, Edouard Vuillard’s “Sacha Guitry in His Dressing Room,” 1912, owned by Perenchio.)

The twist: The museum must fund, construct, and open its planned ($600 million-ish) Peter Zumthor building on schedule (c. 2023)—or else the gift may be rescinded. Back in 1971, Perenchio put up $5 million to get Muhammad Ali into the ring with Joe Frazier. Get ready for the Capital Campaign of the Century.

It’s not just a question of raising the money, formidable as that challenge is. The clock is ticking… Any delay could potentially invalidate the gift: an earthquake, a stock market crash, a construction workers’ strike, fossil discoveries on site, etc., etc. This week every museum director must envy Michael Govan, but they’re also praying their own donors don’t get the idea of gift-wrapping an ultimatum.

What could the Perenchio bequest mean to LACMA? The museum says it’s set to gain “at least” 47 works by 23 artists. It has released images of 10 works, and the press release identifies a few more by name. Some of those works are already well-known, having been lent to exhibitions and widely reproduced. It is possible to say that, in quality, Perenchio’s collection is in a league with those of Norton Simon, Walter Annenberg, and Leonard Lauder. The bequest would give LACMA its only major works by Manet and Caillebotte; its most iconic pieces by Monet, Degas, Bonnard, and Léger. It would double, or nearly so, the museum’s representation of Pissarro and Magritte. A 1909 cubist drawing, Picasso’s Head of Fernande, is one of the choicest of modern drawings, poised on the cusp of art history.

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Monet: LACMA presently has four Monet paintings. Perenchio would add three, making seven—and the three Perenchio Monets would be the ones visitors remember. LACMA stands to have the biggest and best holding of Monet west of Chicago.

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Caillebotte: LACMA has nothing by Caillebotte, the once-forgetten Impressionist whose few best works now command eight-figure prices. In 2011 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts paid $16 million for Man at His Bath (selling a Monet, a Renoir, a Gauguin, and five other paintings to defray the cost). Perenchio’s Caillebotte, A Soldier, must be a response to Manet’s Fifer. It might be the third most important Caillebotte in America (after those in Chicago and Boston)?

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Pissarro: Perenchio’s three paintings would augment the three in the Lazarof collection and the bird’s eye urban landscape, La Place du Théâtre Français, that the De Sylvas gave the pre-LACMA County Museum. That would make 7 Pissarros in all—not bad, considering that Impressionist-rich Art Institute of Chicago has 10.

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Magritte: LACMA has two Magritte paintings; the Perenchio gift would double that to four. Below center and right are Stimulation Objective No. 3 (1939) and Liaisons Dangereuses (1935). Thanks to the preeminent importance of Treachery of Images, already in the collection, LACMA’s representation of Magritte stands to rival MoMA’s holding of seven Magritte paintings.

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https://lacma24.rssing.com/chan-17088308/all_p5.html