For Donors, a Bittersweet Parting With Beloved Works

On the eve of donating their massive collection of Mexican Modernist art to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Edith Lewin, 86, is not quite ready to say goodbye--either to the artworks she and husband Bernard Lewin, 91, have been collecting since 1958, or to the couple’s long career as art dealers in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs.

B. Lewin Galleries officially closed in July, when Bernard finally made the decision to shut down their last gallery in Palm Springs and allow their private collection to move to the museum. The museum will announce today that it is acquiring 1,800 works, valued at an estimated $25 million, from the Lewins in an arrangement that will provide the couple with an undisclosed annuity.

Although the couple began acquiring Mexican art to sell, over the years they found themselves deciding to keep more and more of it. “We didn’t want to sell--we felt already it belonged in a museum,” Bernard said.

“I feel bad that it goes away,” Edith Lewin said during a conversation Thursday at the couple’s Beverly Hills apartment. “I love it; I feel bad when this all goes. I am so used to work--go in the morning, come home at night. I liked it. I love the work.”

Bernard Lewin is more ready than his wife to finally enjoy the fruits of retirement from the art business--but he acknowledges that neither of them has fully let go of the past. Two of the primary works from the Lewins’ collection--the only known easel portrait painted by Diego Rivera of his wife, artist Frida Kahlo, and a painting by Kahlo called “Weeping Coconuts”--are still sitting on the floor of the apartment as they await transfer to LACMA. He affectionately calls the Kahlo “Tears of the Coconut.”

“We did not donate these yet--after we are gone, they get them,” he said. The paintings will not become the property of LACMA until the couple have died, although the works will be on loan to the museum.

The Lewins look healthy, energetic and dapper--he in a black pinstriped suit, she in a flowing orange pantsuit decorated with delicate red flowers. Both recently got their driver’s licenses renewed. It is not surprising that it took Bernard Lewin until age 90 to feel the need to begin planning a future for the artworks beyond his own.

“I don’t know what will happen to me in the next few years, and the whole responsibility should not go to my wife,” he said.

“We can see it any time we want to; it is in a very prominent museum. We are very proud and excited to have it displayed in a beautiful museum like this.”

Bernard Lewin said that at first he objected to LACMA because the museum had shown little interest in Mexican artists in the past. “They had hardly anything . . . but a new group of directors and so on are very excited about it,” he said.

Bernard Lewin was born in 1906 in Wiesbaden, Germany. In 1938, the family fled the Nazis and moved to Los Angeles, where they had friends. Lewin bought a truck for $30 and became a furniture mover. When a client sold him his household goods for $500, Lewin turned around and resold them and invested the profit in his own furniture business.

In Los Angeles, Lewin owned the B. Lewin furniture stores in Van Nuys, Glendale and North Hollywood, where he also exhibited artworks until he closed the stores in the mid-1970s. From 1968 until 1986 he and his wife owned and operated the B. Lewin Galleries in Beverly Hills.

A 1985 trip to Mexico persuaded the Lewins to feature Mexican art exclusively in their galleries--they fell in love with the Mexican artists’ way with color and texture. “They are very, very important in their own way, in their own style,” Bernard said. “They have learned from the European art, but in my opinion they have become even better than many of the well-known European artists.

“I became very close with many of the leading artists. Rufino Tamayo called me his best friend. He was an introvert, he was not an outgoing person, but I loved him, and he seemed to like me.” The Lewins bought artworks directly from the artists and their families, not from dealers.

The couple have decided against leaving the collection to their heirs. Son Ralph owns a gallery of Southwest art in Palm Springs, and they have two grandchildren.

“My son is very well off, and if we pass away, they get enough,” Bernard said. “This is such a big collection, it would be silly, really, to give it to one person. They wouldn’t know what to do with it. And we take pleasure too--any time we want to see it [at LACMA], we can.”

Now that he has retired, Bernard plans to devote more time to his hobby. “I am an amateur artist painter; now I have the chance to develop,” he said, shyly displaying one of his own works, a vibrantly colorful painting of two clowns. “Maybe I try my own style.”