I'm no fan of public art museums exhibiting private collections. The negatives so far outweigh the positives that such shows hurt, rather than help, a museum's mission.
The latest example is "Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.: Selections From the Cheech Marin Collection," which opened recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The clumsy title is the least of its problems.
"Los Angelenos" is a smaller, more focused version of "Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge." That show began a multiyear, corporate-sponsored national tour of about 15 small or regional museums and exhibition halls in the spring of 2001. (The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., also hosted it, but not at one of the institution's six art museums.) The work is loosely characterized by a dual embrace of American pop culture and Mexican Modern art traditions.
Comedian and actor Cheech Marin has been an avid fan of Chicano painting for a couple of decades, and he's built a sizable collection. When I saw the original show four years ago, I wrote that it "includes several terrific works made since the 1980s. . . . But as a history of Chicano painting, which stretches to the dawn of the 1970s, this show is severely limited."
Those limitations persist at LACMA, where a whittled selection of some 50 works is on view. About 10 paintings come from sources other than Marin, including the museum's own collection. But the show doesn't come close to being an incisive historical survey.
The name game
The name-dropping in the title is also annoying. There are only two occasions when I care to see the name of someone who is not an artist in the title of an art museum exhibition.
One is when it accompanies a gift of art, as with the Museum of Modern Art's 2005 "Contemporary Voices: Works From the UBS Art Collection." The other is posthumously, in something like "Cezanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde," the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2006 study of a pivotal art dealer, circa 1900.
Like the art dealer (and like the Swiss bank), Marin is keen on certain painters. And he wants others to be keen on them too. Good for him. Lots of artists have likely benefited from his fervor. Unfortunately, promotional enthusiasm is not enough justification for an art museum to organize a show. Not by a long shot.
A better argument
