A Coup for MOCA : L.A. museum gets lion’s share of Marcia Weisman collection

The team formed by museum director Richard Koshalek, the trustees and the curators of the Museum of Contemporary Art has scored a real coup, securing the largest part of the Marcia Simon Weisman collection of drawings, paintings, etchings and lithographs.

The 83 remarkable works on paper by contemporary artists Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, Richard Diebenkorn and Sam Francis that have now become part of MOCA’s collection raise considerably the stature of the nascent contemporary art museum. Apart from the collection, the gift included the funds necessary to develop a study center for works on paper and appoint a curator to oversee the collection and take care of the new installation. But that is not all. A gift of this magnitude generally acts as a magnet to attract other worthy art collections.

Marcia Simon Weisman, sister of the famous collector Norton Simon, began her collection in the 1960s while married to Frederick R. Weisman, also a well-known art collector. When the couple divorced, she kept half the collection and continued purchasing art, mostly work on paper, from young California artists, many of them her friends. In this sense, collecting was a labor of love. A longtime MOCA trustee, Marcia Weisman died in 1991. Her collection was appraised at $6 million to $8 million.

Among the MOCA acquisitions are De Kooning’s renowned 1952 charcoal drawing “Two Women With Still Life,” watercolors by Mark Rothko and Francis and an early surrealist collage of Pollock.

The study center will be opened in 1997. Who knows, maybe by then MOCA’s collection will have grown even more. Once art is properly seeded it flourishes.