Running an art museum was not something James Irvine Swinden ever imagined. When his mother, Joan Irvine Smith, began feverishly collecting California impressionist artwork in the early 1990s, Swinden was happily operating a 12-acre botanical garden on the island of Kauai. So when she asked him to help set up a museum to showcase the […]
Inside an unmarked Los Angeles warehouse, a woman wearing disposable purple gloves uses a $300 specialized flashlight to pore over every inch of a crayon portrait. Framed by towering racks of artwork, she’s inspecting and inventorying a long-hidden stash of 3,200 paintings and statues bequeathed toUCI by Orange County developer Gerald Buck. The collection, a […]
Rarely seen Buck Collection, ‘greatest ever assembled,’ key to major UCI art center