Fourteen Rembrandt paintings are held in collections in Southern California. [1] This accumulation began with J. Paul Getty's purchase of the Portrait of Marten Looten in 1938, and is now the third-largest concentration of Rembrandt paintings in the United States. [2] Portrait of Marten Looten is now housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
The Rembrandt Club of Pomona College in Claremont, California was established in 1905 for the promotion and encouragement of the arts. It predates all of the major art museums of Southern California. and remains active today. [3]
In 1907, Arabella Huntington, whose Southern California home is now the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, purchased Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer (1653) for her house in Paris. After her death the painting was inherited by her son Archer M. Huntington. He sold it in 1928, the year that the Huntington Library, Art Gallery, and Botanical Gardens was established. Aristotle was eventually purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York in 1962, for 2.3 million dollars. At the time this was the highest amount ever paid for a painting at a public or private sale. [4]
In 1913, the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art opened in Exposition Park. The inclusion of the three divisions had been determined in part by the Smithsonian's configuration, and there was very little art to display. In order to meet the deadline of the formal dedication ceremonies on November 6, 1913, the fine arts wing was not only hung with loans from Southern California collectors, but also with a number of works borrowed from East Coast owners. [5] The opening of the museum was timed to coincide with the completion of the Owens Valley aqueduct —it was part of the celebratory festivities. The ready availability of water made the development of Southern California possible.
In the 20th century, collections of art that included paintings by old masters such as Rembrandt were highly sought after by many of America's business elite. Accounts in the Los Angeles Times trumpet the earliest arrivals of professed Rembrandt paintings in the Southland in 1928 and 1932. [6]
An Elderly Jew in Fur Cap (1645) was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Fred E. Keeler of Hollywood in 1928. President and major stockholder of the Lockheed Corporation, Keeler informed the press that he and his wife hoped to build a gallery to house their pictures adjoining their home, and open it to the public. [7] During the fall and winter of 1934-35, the Los Angeles Sunday Times published a series entitled "Southern California's One Hundred Finest Privately Owned Paintings." The Keeler's "Rembrandt" was featured in the first edition of the series. When Mary Keeler died in 1939, she left their collection of art to the County Museum of History, Science, and Art, without restrictions.
Another purported Rembrandt, Portrait of a Woman with Oriental Headdress (1635), was acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Willitts J. Hole of Hancock Park in 1932. An early twentieth century Southern California real estate developer, Hole built a private art gallery adjoining his residence, in which the collection was arranged by nationality and lit by artificial light. In 1938, the Willitts J. Hole collection was donated by his daughter Agnes Hole Rindge to the University of California, Los Angeles. [8] Soon after, on January 8, 1940, the Hole Rembrandt and many other paintings from the collection were installed in the UCLA Library.
Supported by scholars as genuine works by Rembrandt's hand at the time, both the Keeler and Hole pictures have since been reconsidered.
German art historian Wilhelm Valentiner published Rembrandt Paintings in America in 1931, with the inclusion of just one work in California: St. John the Baptist (1632), owned by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst of Los Angeles. [9] In 1947 when the picture was owned by Marion Davies, Hearst gave the funds to Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to purchase it, along with eighteen other works, from her. No longer considered by Rembrandt, it is presently attributed to Govert Flinck and called Portrait of a Bearded Man.
Already a well known art world figure, Wilhelm Valentiner came to Los Angeles in 1946 to assume the directorship of the precursor of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the "Los Angeles County Museum." As described above, prior to a division in 1961, fine art was integrated with history and science in what is now the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County's edifice.
In 1947, shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, Valentiner organized and curated a major loan exhibition of works by Rembrandt and fellow Dutch seventeenth-century painter Frans Hals at the County Museum. The show featured paintings from a number of Southern California private collections such as Jacob M. Heimann of Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty of Los Angeles, Mr. and Mrs. Converse M. Converse of Santa Barbara, and George Huntington Hartford II of Los Angeles; and included the Los Angeles County Museum's Portrait of Marten Looten and the Hammer Museum's Juno.
Getty gave Marten Looten to the Los Angeles County Museum in 1953, undoubtedly convinced to do so by Valentiner. Soon after the Rembrandt expert became the first director of the newly created J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, 1954.
Shortly after the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) had opened in 1961, critic Howard Taubman penned an article in the New York Times entitled "Culture Way Out West: Los Angeles Art Museum Embarks on Long Road to First-Class Status" suggesting that there was a good deal of room for improvement. "Museum leaders have calculated the cost of upgrading various areas of their collection," he states, "To achieve a No. 1 spot in Thai art...would cost only $250,000. To approach the heights of a Rembrandt repository...would cost no less than $65 million." The article also reports a rumor about a Southern California Rembrandt:
While Los Angeles may resent signs of Eastern condescension, it has not lost its sense of humor. It is still capable of chuckling about a story, possibly only a rumor, involving a Rembrandt portrait owned by Howard Ahmanson, banker and patron of the arts. Some doubt has been cast on the authenticity of the painting's attribution, and the plan, the story has it, has been worked out for a test. There is a similar Rembrandt at the National Gallery, and the one here will be carried tenderly in the next month or two to Washington, where the two paintings will be hung and studied side by side. Wouldn't it be funny, remarked a cynical fellow the other day, if some expert opined that the one in Washington is dubious? Are you laughing back there in the East? [10]
Rembrandt, Saint Bartholomew, 1661, was sold in 1962 at a Sotheby's, London standing-room only sale. Purchased by J. Paul Getty, it is now in collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
In 1965, Norton Simon, a Southern California businessman and major Los Angeles County Museum of Art supporter, purchased Rembrandt's Titus at a Christie's London auction. The result was a media commotion. The painting had been knocked down by the auctioneer to an English buyer, but Simon was able to reopen the bidding by producing a letter that proved that the auctioneer had overlooked his prearranged bidding signal. [11] A natural genius at promotion and marketing, Simon arranged the Rembrandt portrait's American debut at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where its debarkation from the plane was filmed. Stating that "the painting has such great beauty and universal appeal that the Norton Simon Foundation has a special obligation to exhibit it in the most favorable circumstances for the widest possible enjoyment," Simon allowed the work to be on view there for six months, where it was seen by over 300,000 visitors. [12] That June, Simon and the Rembrandt picture made the cover of Time Magazine. [13] Disguised as a wrapped Christmas present and featuring a tag reading "To Mother," Titus made the plane trip from DC to Southern California in December 1965 [14]
In 2008 the Hammer Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Norton Simon Museum, and the Timken Museum of Art collaborated on an intramural exhibition of Rembrandt paintings; they called it Rembrandt in Southern California. [15]
The Norton Simon Museum is an art museum located in Pasadena, California, United States. It was previously known as the Pasadena Art Institute and the Pasadena Art Museum and displays numerous sculptures on its grounds.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits.
The Hammer Museum, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, is an art museum and cultural center known for its artist-centric and progressive array of exhibitions and public programs. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur-industrialist Armand Hammer to house his personal art collection, the museum has since expanded its scope to become "the hippest and most culturally relevant institution in town." Particularly important among the museum's critically acclaimed exhibitions are presentations of both historically over-looked and emerging contemporary artists. The Hammer Museum also hosts over 300 programs throughout the year, from lectures, symposia, and readings to concerts and film screenings. As of February 2014, the museum's collections, exhibitions, and programs are completely free to all visitors.
The culture of Los Angeles is rich with arts and ethnically diverse. The greater Los Angeles metro area has several notable art museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the J. Paul Getty Museum on the Santa Monica mountains overlooking the Pacific, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and the Hammer Museum. In the 1920s and 1930s Will Durant and Ariel Durant, Arnold Schoenberg and other intellectuals were the representatives of culture, in addition to the movie writers and directors. As the city flourished financially in the middle of the 20th century, culture followed. Boosters such as Dorothy Buffum Chandler and other philanthropists raised funds for the establishment of art museums, music centers and theaters. Today, the Southland cultural scene is as complex, sophisticated and varied as any in the world.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in Los Angeles, California housed on two campuses: the Getty Center and Getty Villa.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was a Dutch draughtsman, painter, and printmaker. An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art and the most important in Dutch art history. Unlike most Dutch masters of the 17th century, Rembrandt's works depict a wide range of style and subject matter, from portraits and self-portraits to landscapes, genre scenes, allegorical and historical scenes, and biblical and mythological themes as well as animal studies. His contributions to art came in a period of great wealth and cultural achievement that historians call the Dutch Golden Age, when Dutch art, although in many ways antithetical to the Baroque style that dominated Europe, was extremely prolific and innovative and gave rise to important new genres. Like many artists of the Dutch Golden Age, such as Jan Vermeer of Delft, Rembrandt was also an avid art collector and dealer.
Judy Fiskin is an American artist working in photography and video, and a member of the art school faculty at California Institute of the Arts. Her videos have been screened in the Documentary Fortnight series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; her photographs have been shown at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, at The New Museum in New York City, and at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
De Wain Valentine is an American minimalist sculptor who was born in Fort Collins, Colorado. Often associated with the Light and Space movement in the 1960s, he is best known for his minimalist sculptures of translucent glass, fiberglass and cast polyester resin having slick surfaces suggestive of machine made objects. He lives and works in Gardena, California.
The Getty Center, in Los Angeles, California, is a campus of the Getty Museum and other programs of the Getty Trust. The $1.3 billion Center opened to the public on December 16, 1997 and is well known for its architecture, gardens, and views overlooking Los Angeles. The Center sits atop a hill connected to a visitors' parking garage at the bottom of the hill by a three-car, cable-pulled hovertrain people mover.
Glue-size is a painting technique in which pigment is bound (sized) to cloth with hide glue, and typically the unvarnished cloth was then fixed to the frame using the same glue. Glue-size is also known as distemper, though the term "distemper" is applied variously to different techniques. Glue-size was used because hide glue was a popular binding medium in the 15th century, particularly among artists of the Early Netherlandish period, who used it as an inexpensive alternative to oil. Although a large number of works using this medium were produced, few survive today, mainly because of the high perishability of linen cloth and the solubility of hide glue. Well-known and relatively well-preserved — though substantially damaged — the most notable examples include Quentin Matsys' Virgin and Child with Saints Barbara and Catherine and Dirk Bouts' Entombment. In German the technique is known as Tüchleinfarben, meaning “small cloth colours”, or Tüchlein, derived from the German words Tüch and Lein.
Victoria Blyth Hill was an American art conservator who lived and worked in the Venice area of Los Angeles. She retired from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as the Director, Conservation Center in June 2005 when she was honored with an appointment as Senior Conservator Emeritus at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Subsequently she worked with private clients, including artists, individuals, and museums, and operated an art conservation studio near her home. She was a past president of the Western Association for Art Conservation (1979). Blyth-Hill was elected Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) in 1990.
Suzanne Muchnic is an art writer who was a staff art reporter and art critic at the Los Angeles Times for 31 years. She has also written books on artists, collectors, and museums.
Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980 was a scholarly initiative funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust to historicize the contributions to contemporary art history of artists, curators, critics, and others based in Los Angeles. Planned for nearly a decade, PST, as it was called, granted nearly 60 organizations throughout Southern California a total of $10 million to produce exhibitions that explored the years between 1945 and 1980. Underscoring the significance of this project, art critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times:
Before [PST], we knew a lot [about the history of contemporary art], and that lot tended to greatly favor New York. A few Los Angeles artists were highly visible and unanimously revered, namely Ed Ruscha and other denizens of the Ferus Gallery, that supercool locus of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, plus Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, but that was about it. After, we know a whole lot more, and the balance is much more even. One of the many messages delivered by this profusion of what will eventually be nearly 70 museum exhibitions is that New York did not act alone in the postwar era. And neither did those fabulous Ferus boys.
Helen Pashgian is an American visual artist who lives and works in Pasadena, California. She is a primary member of the Light and Space art movement of the 1960s, but her role has been historically under-recognized.
Roberto Chavez is an American artist. known for his personally symbolic portraits, public murals and "funny-grotesque" paintings that reflect the multicultural landscape of Los Angeles. He was recently included in the Getty Center's Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980 and the Smithsonian’s Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art exhibits.
Jo Ann Callis is an American artist who works with photography and is based in California. Her work is held in various public collections.
Pratapaditya Pal is an Indian scholar of Southeast Asian and Himalayan art and culture, specializing particularly in the history of art of India, Nepal and Tibet. He has served as a curator of South Asian art at several prominent US museums including Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has organized more than 22 major exhibitions and helped build the museums' collection. He has also written over 60 books and catalogs, and over 250 articles on the subject, taught at several universities, and served as the editor of the Indian art magazine, Marg. In 2009 he was awarded Padma Shri by the Government of India for his contributions to the study of Indian art.
The Senses is a series of five oil paintings, completed c. 1624 or 1625 by Rembrandt, depicting the five senses. The whereabouts of one, representing the sense of taste, is unknown. Another, representing smell, was only re-identified in 2015.
Norman Charles Zammitt was an American artist in Southern California who was at the leading edge of the Light and Space Movement, pioneering with his transparent sculptures in the early 1960s, followed in the 1970s by his large scale luminous color paintings.
Rena Small is an American conceptual artist who works primarily in photography. Small is best known for her ongoing series The Artists' Hands Continuum, consisting of black and white photographs of the hands of well-known artists. She began the project in 1994.