San Diego museums receive $40-million art collection

Two San Diego museums will share a gift of a private art collection worth $40 million.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the San Diego Museum of Art received a series of Minimalist and contemporary masterpieces from the late Dr. Vance E. Kondon and his wife, Elisabeth Giesberger.

The Museum of Art received 48 German Expressionist paintings, drawings and prints from a range of artists, including Otto Dix, Alexej von Jawlensky, Gabriele Munter and Gustav Klimt. Collection highlights include an erotic drawing by Egon Shiele and a double-sided painting by Max Pechstein.

The Museum of Contemporary Art received 30 contemporary pieces from the 1950s to 1980s, with artworks from Piero Manzoni, Ad Dekkers, Christo, Jules Olitski and Franz Kline, as well as California artists Craig Kauffman and Ron Davis.

Kondon served on the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s Board of Trustees during the 1970s and was known as one of San Diego's top art collectors and supporters. His collection, 30 years in the making, ranged from figurative pieces of the early 1900s to the abstract works of the latter half of the 20th century.

Kondon died in 1997, and Geisberger died last year.

Eli Broad's museum names veteran of San Diego museums -- and U.S. Marines -- as second-in-command

Heath Fox, a retired U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who made a second career helping to run art and photography museums in San Diego’s Balboa Park, was named Wednesday to serve as second-in-command at the Broad –- the downtown art museum that will house Eli Broad’s contemporary art collection and is expected to open in about two years.

As deputy director of operations, Fox, 57, will report to museum director Joanne Heyler. He begins June 27 and will spend the coming two years helping to devise the museum’s operating plan and management approaches. When the Broad opens, he’ll be responsible for planning and operations.

After retiring from the Marines in 1996 after 20 years of service, Fox became associate director of administration at the Museum of Photographic Arts from 1997 to 2001; he oversaw its $6-million expansion in 1999-2000, which increased the museum's size from 7,500 square feet to 31,000.

From 2001 to 2006, Fox was director of administration for the San Diego Museum of Art, serving as its acting director for a year following Don Bacigalupi’s resignation to lead the Toledo Art Museum. (Bacigalupi now works for somebody who could buy and sell Eli Broad three times over, by Forbes magazine’s reckoning: He’s executive director of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, scheduled to open in November in Bentonville, Ark.,  as the personal project of Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, who’s said to be worth $21.2 billion. Crystal Bridges’ endowments now total $800 million.)

Fox moved from museums to academia in 2006, taking his current position as assistant dean of arts and humanities at UC San Diego, with a portfolio that includes strategic planning and administration. Fox earned an undergraduate degree in business finance from Virginia Tech, a master’s in museum studies from the University of Leicester in England, and pursued further studies at Harvard in non-degree programs for management professionals, as well as studying European art history at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London.

In a statement announcing his hiring, Heyler cited Fox’s “breadth of experience and solid track record in arts administration.”

Art review: 'Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman' at the San Diego Museum of Art

SAN DIEGO -- Thomas Gainsborough's name will be forever tightly yoked to "Blue Boy,"  the riveting portrait of young Jonathan Buttall, painted around 1770, standing atop a windswept hill in the English countryside and dressed in the satin garb of an earlier aristocratic era. It's the most famous portrait in America. The painting's brilliance, lofted by dazzling brushwork, has a lot to do with its celebrity.

So does money. When railroad baron Henry E. Huntington decided to buy "Blue Boy" from the Duke of Westminster in 1921 and bring it from England to Los Angeles, he spent more money than was ever known to have been paid for an Old Master painting. The fanfare was played for all it was worth, and Huntington happily fanned the publicity's flames.

There's no business like show business, a fact now underscored by a captivating Gainsborough exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art. Organized with the Cincinnati Art Museum around the Ohio collection's marvelous full-length portrait of musician Ann Ford, "Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman" puts the focus on his paintings of the distaff side. "Blue Boy" is more famous, but Gainsborough's women might finally be more fully revealing of his ultimate achievement.

The show is small -- just 11 paintings, plus a few period costumes to elaborate late-18th-century styles of dress, so important to this art. But the loans are exceptional: full-length works from the Tate, the Metropolitan, the Getty, the Huntington and more.

None is more impressive than the half-length seated portrait of Sarah Siddons from London's National Gallery, an iconic work in Gainsborough's career. Satin, fur, tulle, feathers, felt, cotton, velvet, lace -- if you didn't know that the painter was the son of a successful textile merchant, this portrait might give you a clue.

Gainsborough senior benefited from England's explosive Industrial Revolution; his son's intimate knowledge of fabrics would later stand him in good stead as a fashionable portrait painter of people whose established social roles were shifting. The eminent actress is portrayed as a stylish matron -- a compendium of sensual tactility, all in soft contrast to her smooth, almost sculptural, nearly alabaster skin.

Unidentified painting at Yale is really early Velázquez, says curator John Marciari

John Marciari, now curator of European art at the San Diego Museum of Art, has made the front page of newspapers in Spain. 

His news? He has published an article in the new issue of the Madrid quarterly Ars making the case that a painting he found in storage in 2004 at the Yale University Art Gallery, right, is actually an altarpiece by the celebrated Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. 

"The Education of the Virgin," missing paint in spots and trimmed at the top, looked "pretty beat up," when he first saw it as a junior curator at the Yale gallery, Marciari says. "It was dirty, with a bit of tissue paper stuck on the canvas to hold the paint in place."

It wasn't until a few months later that it hit him: "This is an early Velázquez." And in the years since then he has marshaled stylistic evidence and technical data to help build his case.

Reattributions are tricky, and don't stick without the support of other experts in the field. Which makes this case even more extraordinary so far. 

Even though they have yet to see the painting in the flesh, some Velázquez experts have already expressed enthusiasm about the discovery for providing new insight into the artist's early development. Next step is for curators at the Prado, the mother lode of Velázquez paintings, to weigh in. 

For the full story, click here.

-- Jori Finkel

www.twitter.com/jorifinkel

Image: "The Education of the Virgin," circa 1617, attributed to Diego Velázquez. Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery.