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Resnick and Marino shows will highlight singular tastes in art

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It’s axiomatic that behind nearly every great public or semi-public art collection is a strong-willed, intellectually restless, borderline-obsessive private collector.

And thank goodness for that, many museum directors would respond. Without these well-endowed iconoclasts we wouldn’t have the Frick Collection, the Wallace Collection, or a hundred city blocks’ worth of museum galleries devoted to showcasing the sensibilities, whether avant-garde or classical, purist or eclectic, of their donors.

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We also wouldn’t have two single-collector exhibitions opening this month in Southern California: ‘Eye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collection,’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and ‘Beauty and Power: Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Peter Marino Collection,’ running Oct. 9-Jan. 24, 2011, at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

LACMA’s show, which draws from the Beverly Hills manse of local arts benefactors Stewart and Lynda Resnick, consists of about 85 paintings, sculptures and decorative arts with strong Enlightenment, Romantic and Neo-Classical pedigrees. ‘Beauty and Power’ offers a glimpse inside the Upper East Side Manhattan home of architect Marino, a figure reputedly as colorful and dynamic as any of his bronzes.

We take a look at the art of collecting and some of the challenges it raises for curators and museum directors in this Sunday Calendar feature.

-- Reed Johnson

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